Mozilla working on a Firefox-powered clone of Google Chromecast

A senior Mozilla employee has revealed the web giant is working on a “TV casting prototype device” running Firefox OS. In a tweet, Mozilla principal developer evangelist Christian Heilmann showed off the prototype device, which works in a similar fashion to Google’s ChromeCast:

A fully open TV casting prototype device running #FirefoxOS. Open boot loader and all. pic.twitter.com/bZ0Uz8P0Zs

— Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) June 19, 2014

Heilmann then responded to early press reports, saying that the device was a “prototype” rather than a “leak”:

@Caspy7 it is not a leak but a prototype. Mozilla works in the open. Official things you hear about on day one.

— Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) June 20, 2014

But later, Heilmann denied Mozilla did “secret projects” at all:

I work at Mozilla because there are no secret projects and you can take our code and be creative with it. We do open source, not hardware.

— Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) June 21, 2014

Aside from low-end smartphones, Mozilla is working on a range of devices running its Firefox OS operating system, including PCs, smart TVs and tablets. Meanwhile last week, Mozilla announced that Firefox OS apps downloaded from Mozilla Marketplace run natively on Android devices.