Phone makers ZTE and TCL Communication Technology will roll out the first Firefox OS phones using Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors in early 2013, a news wire reported on Tuesday.

The move, supposedly aimed at taking on Google and Apple in the smartphone market, has got the backing of several major telecom companies,

Mozilla has said that mobile network operators Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Smart, Telecom Italia , Telenor and Etisalat are backing the Firefox platform.

The new Firefox platform aims to overcome the problem by tapping into a community of 3 to 5 million web developers and most of the apps are already created on HTML5, the preferred standard for creating mobile browser content.