In addition to developing Firefox and Thunderbird, the Mozilla Foundation runs a raft of other, lesser-known technology projects. Among the more technically ambitious of these is WebThings, an open-source smart home platform that launched from incubation on Thursday.

WebThings provides software modules for building and managing internet-connected devices. It consists of two components that serve entirely different purposes but complement one another.

The first is WebThings Gateway, which is designed to run on the router that connects the smart gadgets in a home to the internet. It can transform a device as simple a Raspberry Pi into a network gateway with the capacity to process traffic from all the connected appliances in a household. Routing communications through a single device in such a centralized manner makes it possible to provide a fairly sophisticated set of management features.

WebThings Gateway has a built-in conversational assistant that lets users remotely control gadgets with text or voice commands. A consumer could, for instance, use an app to open their garage door when they get home from work. The software also has an IFTTT-like tool that can be used to have devices perform actions automatically in response to certain events, like if a person enters the living room.

The other component of WebThings is the WebThings Framework. It’s a toolkit for building the on-device management software that powers an appliance’s smart features, handles low-level tasks such as networking and facilities remote management.

The WebThings Framework provides ready-made software modules to reduce the amount of work involved in implementing these capabilities. Developers can customize the modules for a wide range of devices, from simple sensors to more sophisticated devices such as thermostats.

Now that Mozilla has deemed it stable enough to exit incubation, WebThings should become a much more attractive option for companies building smart home products. As part of the launch, the browser maker also released several new features that could further increase the platform’s appeal.

The biggest enhancement is a new privacy-focused monitoring dashboard. It provides interactive graphs that show users what data their smart home appliances collect, as well as how metrics such as device power consumption change over time. The dashboard is joined by a more niche set of features that will allow consumers to receive notifications from WebThings-powered alarms on their phones.

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