"The Mozilla vision for mobile is to have fewer silos and more hyperlinks, and more data portability," said Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO and the creator of JavaScript, speaking Wednesday at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

"Users should not lose their data in a data coffin, or lose it due to some terms of service or cloud accident," he said, referring to how user's data and applications are usually locked into one type of device. "You should take the apps you buy from one device to another."

The world for online mobile applications closely resembles that of the early days of the commercial Internet, Eich said, where content providers such as America Online offered a "walled garden" approach in which content and services were offered as independent services. They were accessible only by a stand-alone application on the desktop, or, later, by a specific browser, notably Internet Explorer.

Today's mobile applications are a return to this walled-garden approach, Eich told the audience. So, Mozilla has set a goal for itself to standardize mobile application development on Web standards.