Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to include — and in places exceed — the capabilities of the competing stacks in question.

Mozilla wants to develop new APIs that would allow web-based applications to access hardware such as USB, Bluetooth, cameras, SMS, NFC and telephony. These would, of course, have a “privilege” system to ensure that potentially malevolent applications wouldn’t be able to access the hardware without your consent.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Google, with Chrome OS, seems to be primarily interested in the development of cheap hardware that boots into a browser. Mozilla, on the other hand, is currently more focused on enhancing web applications to make that sort of device more viable. And some of the APIs would likely be implemented in full-featured mobile operating systems like Android and iOS sooner or later.

Boot to Gecko [wiki.mozilla.org]

The data is based off the uptime of the individual companies’ websites. Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat, Slackware, and the others listed all use their own operating systems to run their servers, and you would expect them to put a bit of resources into making sure their sites are as reliable as possible, correct? After all, would you use a server OS from an organization whose website goes down frequently? Normally a product’s website speaks well for the product’s reliability, or so many people assume anyway.

It should be taken into account that these websites have different kinds of resources behind them. Many are run by enthusiasts with a minimum of resources, while others have corporate backing. Keep this in mind while reviewing the data.

Yet Microsoft, who arguably has the most cash to throw around, has one of the worst scores downtime-wise. I’m not a Microsoft fan by any stretch (I like Linux on my servers, and the Mac OS for desktop use), though I have more experience with their consumer-level OSes than any other. I know Windows is a pile of swiss-cheesed spaghetti code…but with the kind of resources they have, how are they letting everyone else run cirlces around them? It’s not even funny anymore.

For all the fun charts and numbers, click through to Royal Pingdom to the full article.