Take That, Chromecast: Mozilla Working on 'Streaming Stick' of its Own

The Firestick? The Foxcast? We don't quite have a name for you just yet — neither does the company, we suspect — but a recent swath of articles suggests that Mozilla is rumored to be a working on a Chromecast competitor of its very own.

Well, not quite "rumored to be" as "perhaps accidentally confirmed by a Mozilla employee." Developer evangelist Christian Heilmann, of Mozilla,tweeted out a lovely picture of the yet-unnamed device on Thursday. He also confirmed that said Firefox stick runs FirefoxOS "open boot loader and all."

We're not even that sure this was all that accidental, given that the picture is still online as of this article's writing. If you ask us, it even looks more like a press photograph than a candid shot of Mozilla's new hardware.

That all said, Gigaom reports that other key details about just what Mozilla happens to be working on remain shrouded in secrecy. The project has no name; it has no price. There's no indication as to when it might go on sale, or even where (or how) it might go on sale.

However, the device will — interestingly enough — be able to run some Chromecast-friendly apps once it launches. The overall goal appears to be to allow users to cast their Firefox browser windows to HDMI-friendly devices, in addition to providing a platform for casting that will allegedly be even more "open and hackable" than Google Chromecast, reports Gigaom's Janko Roettgers.

Google, after all, restricts its SDK to just Android, iOS, and Web apps. It also won't let certain app publishers tap into Chromecast-based streaming — explicit content being one such area. App developers who publish "nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material" aren't allowed to tap into the Chromecast SDK, nor are those whose apps promote hate speech, violence, bullying, or online gambling.

"Mozilla's device won't come with these kinds of restrictions, which could enable developers to add cast capabilities to Windows Phone or Fire phone apps. Moreover, developers could also add casting to desktop apps, and may even be able to build their own cast-enabled hardware with little interference from Mozilla. It's also possible that the hardware could be used to run other software, as it will apparently come with an open boot loader," Roettgers writes.

If you're looking for Mozilla to spill the beans any more, you'll have to wait. The company provided Roettgers with a statement, but it only addresses the notion that Mozilla will likely be pretty hands off when it comes to the actual manufacturing of the HDMI streaming stick.

"Firefox OS is an open platform freely available for any company to build on top of without restriction. This means companies can experiment with different form factors that run Firefox OS," reads the company's statement.