While the first devices with Firefox OS are yet to ship, and Firefox OS itself isn’t entirely developed yet, Mozilla developers have released the first version of the Firefox OS Simulator.
For those who haven’t been following the development of Firefox OS, it is a mobile operating system designed for low cost phones built entirely on web standard. Firefox OS is essentially a Linux kernel running the Firefox browser engine, with the rest of the OS and its components developed entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. All applications for Firefox OS are likewise developed in web standards.
Apps for Firefox OS are essentially web applications, so there are already enough platforms to test it on, however the Firefox OS simulator lets you see how they work with, and feel in Mozilla’s mobile OS. As the name suggests, it is not an emulator, it does not emulate the hardware on which Firefox OS will run, rather it just includes browser render layer of the OS and the HTML code, since the rendering layer (Gecko) is already a part of Firefox.
The Firefox OS Simulator is distributed as a Firefox add-on, which when installed allows you to launch Firefox OS straight from Firefox. It also interacts with Firefox allowing you to install apps straight from the browser, debug applications using the Firefox console, and connect to remote Firefox OS instances.
You can get Firefox OS Simulator from the Firefox Add-ons website and start playing with Firefox OS.
For Windows users, there is good news; while earlier builds of the Firefox OS for Windows have been prone to crash, recent builds do not suffer from that issue.
You can also check out the following video that shows the Firefox OS Simulator in action, and also has information on how it can be obtained and installed:
