It’s quite likely that you’ve never heard of Kylo, but the big-screen browser made by Hillcrest Labs has been providing a great living room surfing experience for more than two years. Now, the company has announced that they’re open sourcing Kylo under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0).
Going open is a logical move by the makers of the Gecko-powered browser, and it’s one that will allow developers of home theater-focused linux distributions (and other media center software) to more easily customize and adapt Kylo to suit their particular needs.
Since it’s built on Mozilla’s core, Kylo offers rich support for web standards like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and it also plays nice with NPAPI plug-ins like Flash. That’s handy for those times when you just can’t avoid Adobe’s oft-maligned tech, like when you really, really need to play a game of Robot Unicorn Attack.
One bit of functionality Kylo offers that other browsers don’t is built-in support for Hillcrest’s Freespace pointing devices, which offer gesture-powered navigation controls. The Kylo/Freespace one-two punch is used by Warpia TV, the slick PC-to-TV streaming solution that was introduced at CES 2012.
Kylo is currently available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and Hillcrest recently pushed an update that offers better support for 1080P televisions. With a full-on HD interface on board, the Kylo dashboard and overall browsing experience is more crisp, clear, and enjoyable than ever before. If you’re running an HTPC — or even occasionally hooking up a laptop to your HDTV with an HDMI cable — it’s well worth your time to take Kylo for a test drive.
