VIA Partners with Mozilla to Develop Firefox OS, Offers Free APCs to Bug Fixers

Mozilla's efforts to flesh out and promote its Firefox OS for new mobile devices got a shot in the arm today with VIA announcing an official partnership with the browser and operating system maker. VIA says it will help support and develop Firefox OS for new device form factors, and the company's also providing incentive for coders to patch up existing bugs on its own devices.

Now that Firefox OS is running on APC's low-cost Paper and Rock boards with buildable source codes available to developers on GitHub, VIA says it will give away free APCs to anyone who fixes a known issue, a list of which is posted on GitHub.

"We are excited to announce this partnership with Mozilla and their enthusiastic support to speed development of Firefox OS on APC," said Richard Brown, VP of International Marketing, VIA Technologies Inc. "Mozilla's mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web, aligns with our vision for APC, creating the perfect combination to deliver the best of the web to desktops everywhere. We couldn’t be more excited about the future."

VIA's collaborative development efforts have already resulted in a Firefox OS update (version 1.02.01) with a number of bug fixes, including a Wi-Fi connection issue. The latest build also now supports mouse wheel events.