Straight from the heart of Mozilla’s developer newsgroup comes news of an ambitious new project: a standalone, web-based operating system.

It’s currently being developed for mobile devices. And it’s partially Android-based.

According to Dr. Andreas Gal, researcher at Mozilla, the impetus behind the Boot to Gecko project is to “make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike” and would ultimately extend beyond just mobile devices. Should Gal and his colleagues succeed, Boot to Gecko would have the potential to change how we interact with the web, regardless of platform.

Gal breaks the process down into actionable steps. First, the Boot to Gecko project aims to take the primary functions of a mobile device (i.e. “Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC”) and create web APIs to handle them. From there, they intend to develop a way for web pages and applications to safely access those components as needed. They hope that by doing this, they (and other intrepid developers) will be able to create native-grade apps that run directly on the web instead of only being available on certain devices.

Boot to Gecko will inevitably draw comparisons to ChromeOS but it stands to gain a much richer online experience if it works out.