For those who are waiting for Mozilla to finally take the wraps off Firefox OS, "early 2013" feels a long ways off. However, if you want to whet your appetite for the long-awaited project, the official Mozilla blog has shared a wealth of details behind the design of the forthcoming OS. The post itself is essentially a recap of a presentation given at MozCamp Warsaw earlier this month; in it, designer Patryk Adamczyk walks through the design philosophy, iconography, typography, and sound elements involved in making Firefox OS a beautiful and modern tool.

There's an incredible amount of detail in this post, but it gives a great idea of how the OS will look and function — for example, content layering through the use of sliding panes (like in Facebook and Sparrow's iOS apps) appear to be a key design element. Mozilla also laid out the details on when to use light backgrounds vs. dark backgrounds, the latter of which are meant to be reserved for media applications to create a more "cinematic" experience. On the other hand, productivity apps with an emphasis on typography are meant to have a white background to "create a sense of an office."

Additionally, Mozilla showed off its homescreen, app grid, and lock screen, which feels like a nice mashup of WebOS and Android, while some of its built-in apps share a small bit of iOS' skeuomorphic tendencies while being much more elegant and less gaudy. Overall, it's a handsome-looking OS that appears to have had a lot of thought put into it long before a phone would be available in consumers hands — we imagine that it won't need to go through the same major visual revisions that Android did over the years.