Earlier in August month Mozilla developers released a desktop (nightly) build of Firefox OS called as B2G desktop client,which provided the preview of mobile OS on desktop and allowed develpoers to test their apps on Firefox OS without having to deploy them to actual devices, however installing it is difficult and it is significantly different from Firefox OS on a phone.
To ease this process , Mozilla developer Myk Melez released r2d2b2g Firefox browser addon, which allows you test the Firefox right from your browser.According to Myk, r2d2b2g is an experimental prototype test environment for Firefox OS.
r2d2b2g is short form of “Ready to Deliver to Boot to Gecko”, you can install the addon on desktop platforms :Mac, Linux (32-bit), and Windows
For those who don’t know about Firefox OS, On July 2,2012, Mozilla announced “Firefox OS”, a mobile operating system based on HTML5 language, which is used to make websites and other applications.
Codename’d as“Boot 2 Gecko”, the Web-based OS from Mozilla will support will support everything you would expect from a smart phone such as dialing, messaging, internet browsing, web gaming, photo taking, video watching, and music.. e.t.c.
How to test Firefox OS with r2d2b2g addon?
1.First run Firefox browser, then download r2d2b2g addon according to your desktop OS and open the “.xp” file to install the addon.
2.Next enable “menu bar” on Firefox browser,start B2G Desktop by selecting Tools > B2G Desktop.
3.To install an app into B2G Desktop, navigate to it in Firefox, then select Tools > Install Page as App.
My view :
I installed the add-on on Firefox browser from my windows 7 (64-bit) OS, but experienced crashes.The developer Myk, noted that the Windows version of B2G Desktop currently crashes on start-up due to bug 795484. However, the add-on works on Mac and Linux without any issues.