Mozilla developers hope to start testing phones running its new mobile operating system this quarter, with product demos slated for the first quarter next year and "productization" set for before June 2012, according to a road map on the project's website.

Mozilla announced the project, called Boot to Gecko (B2G), in July, describing it as an operating system for mobile devices that would run applications primarily on the Web.

Developers hope B2G will help solve a problem that has long plagued the mobile industry: Developers must rewrite apps for each operating system. The goal of B2G is to create a framework that would let applications run from the Web on any operating system, provided the OS supports B2G's technology.

By the end of this year, the developers hope to have basic functions built and integrated including the accelerometer, camera, messaging, telephony and power management, according to the road map recently posted on the site.

B2G is using pieces of Android, the operating system based on Linux and developed by Google.