ZTE Corp., a maker of mobile phones from China, plans to release the world's first smartphone powered by Mozilla Firefox operating system sometimes early next year. In a bid to further differentiate itself from the rivals, ZTE also intends to jump on the Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Phone 8 bandwagon in the same timeframe.

He Shiyou, an executive vice president of ZTE, at a press conference on Wednesday revealed the company's plans to increase its smartphone market share from around 5% this year. Two efforts that the company intends to undertake to do this is to release smartphones based on Microsoft Windows Phone 8 and Mozilla Firefox PS in the first quarter of 2013, reports the Wall Street Journal. The company did not elaborate about the future smartphones.

Smartphone vendors these days look beyond market dominating Google Android platform in a bid to offer something unique. Big companies, such as Apple or Samsung Electronics develop their own iOS and Bada operating systems, whereas smaller show interest in projects like Mozilla Firefox OS (also known as Boot to Gecko) as well as Alibaba Group's Aliyun mobile operating system.

Not a lot is known about Firefox operating system for  smartphones. In general, the OS is based on open Web standards, partly relies on Web applications and thus is completely different from the approach proposed by Android, iOS and WP.

Tags: ZTE, Firefox, Mozilla, iOS, Android, Google