Mozilla is letting you try out its new mobile operating system on the computer. The test versions of the Firefox Mobile OS have been released as desktop builds that will help developers put it through its paces on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The HTML5-based mobile platform is expected to launch in early 2013 as Firefox Mobile OS and take on the fiercely competitive smartphone market. Codenamed Boot 2 Gecko, the Firefox OS will use Open Web Standards and has the backing of leading telecom companies.

In a recent blog post, Mozilla’s Tony Chung mentioned the latest that has come out of the project, “We’ve been culturally challenged to build up an interested community of testers, but limited to our distribution of builds due to legal contracts. However, the release engineering team was able to get Daily desktop builds created and published online for anyone to play with.”

Setup instructions are available on the Gaia/Hacking site. App developers can use these nightly builds to build and check their own apps, so that they can hit the ground running when the Firefox OS is launched in 2013. Even if you are not a developer, you can participate in the project by testing it and letting the team know about bugs.

To get involved with development and testing, visit the B2G page on the MozillaWiki to get started. Feel free to come back here and tell us about your first impressions.

Source: Dknite’s Lair