Mozilla is expected Wednesday to announce plans for Mozilla Marketplace, offering mobile apps for  the iPhone, an Android phone, or a Windows phone.

Mozilla is also working to develop a smartphone that would not be locked into the “walled gardens” of apps, operating systems and devices that are now controlled by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and a few others.

Mozilla’s vision is to develop a phone (code-named “Boot to Gecko”) that would run apps within the phone’s browser and it is talking to manufacturers and wireless carriers that might build and support a Mozilla phone, with a prototype possible  next week. It would run critical software like JavaScript and HTML5 directly.

In essence, the phone’s browser would become the operating system, supporting features like the camera, voice communication, and geolocation abilities of the phone.

Firefox now has about 450 million users, but access to the Internet is increasingly going mobile.

Mozilla is also trying to have an impact in the area of privacy and social networks, with “BrowserID,” which would allow users to register and log in to a website without sharing large amounts of their personal data.