Firefox OS (formerly known as Boot 2 Gecko) is a new, open-source mobile operating system by the mozilla team. unlike it's competitors, it runs web technology almost directly on top of a linux kernel (it uses Gonk, a stripped-down linux distro with plenty of hardware support for HTML5/javascript etcetera) to make them MUCH faster. basically, the entire operating system is a web browser, with the interface written in HTML5 and completely customisable by the end user.
a couple of hardware companies have signed on to produce phones, and prototypes are already making the rounds. so, who's excited?

here are a couple of articles: rawkes.com blog.mozzila.org

EDIT (Eeems): Here are a few official sites about FxOS
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/

I've been following this ever since it was first announced.

Looks nice though I have to wonder how good is its support for hardware? Also if they make a phone how would they distribute apps or would everything be online?

They have a marketplace that is completely open, so from what I understand about it, no gatekeepers. Hardware support is it will run on anything that can run android. They use a custom android kernel. Take a look here for more information on that.
You might also want to take a look at https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G for more information on the more detailed parts of things.
If you just want a quick overview of things that aren't so technical take a peek here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/

EDIT:

so, who's excited?

Well, I am obviously

Looking very nice! But how would cam and so on work then?

Looking pretty good.  I just hope it doesn't have the same problem as the browser with the random freezing. the that's fixable if you have the patience I guess?

I use Fx nightly, the random freezing hardly happens. Usually it only happens with downloads. I've also noticed that the random freezing only happens on windows.

Seems nice. Hopefully it offers as much freedom in terms of app downloads as Android, if not more. Unlike Apple <.<

It offers more freedom, see:

I've been following this ever since it was first announced.

Quote from: ruler501 on September 15, 2012, 11:38:14 pm

Looks nice though I have to wonder how good is its support for hardware? Also if they make a phone how would they distribute apps or would everything be online?

They have a marketplace that is completely open, so from what I understand about it, no gatekeepers.

Looking very nice! But how would cam and so on work then?

They have created a api for handling it. The first link I give in my post is where you can find out about all that. The camera api is actually suppose to become a standard in all browsers too.

i havent seen it when browsing through but I may have just missed it but how do they control what apps have what permissions? I'd hate for a random web page to be able to access my camera and call people.

They are in the middle of changing how that is done to something that follows html5 standards or something right now. I'm not entirely sure what it's being changed to, I haven't really read up on it.
I'd suggest that if you are really interested in this project that you should follow @Boot2Gecko on twitter. That's how I actually know stuff like this lol

EDIT: This might answer your question: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G_App_Security_Model

Hopefully as time goes by its startup speed will not become as bad as Firefox on anything lower than a dual core system with 8 GB of RAM (about one minute more than IE, Chrome and Opera) and it will not crash every 30 second like Firefox 1 through 3 (I think I had crashes on more recent versions of Firefox browser too) when a site uses Flash or Javascript.

Startup speed is 12 seconds for a cold boot on older phones. 8 seconds on newer ones. Shutdown is instant.

That is good. My Samsung Galaxy 551 takes like 20 seconds to boot and 12-15 seconds to shut down >.<

I have the exact same phone. Is it released yet? If so, I wonder if you can test it on an emulator already (like how you can with the Android SDK) and/or someone will provide a way to replace our Android roms with it, like Cyanogenmod and stuff like that. Anyway that looks pretty nice.

As for the market, they already have experience with their addon site, I guess they'll use the same technology.

EDIT: After reading the blog posts, I'm like, omg can't wait installing that thing on my device, then telling DJ_O about it how it runs faster and everything.

EDIT2: It's all there: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS

Do they make use of enough threads ?
That's actually one of the reasons I use Chromium on my computer, because (my computer is not that fast) pages regularly freeze and that causes the entire browser to hang.