Ring, Ring! Pick Up the Phone, Firefox Is Calling
Next year, Mozilla plans to release a version of its Firefox web browser for mobile devices.
This is a change of thinking for Mozilla, which until now has focused primarily on the desktop and spent a comparatively small amount of energy on mobile development.
In a blog post Wednesday, Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer announced that "Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens."
Schroepfer points out that Firefox is already a part of Ubuntu Mobile, and that a Mozilla-based browser is currently running on the Nokia N800 handheld. He says the official mobile version of Firefox will ship in 2008, well after Firefox 3 for the desktop.
Mobile Firefox will be able to run extensions and it will have full support for XUL, Mozilla’s native interface framework for building skins and applications.
The company has also hired Christian Sejersen, former browser guru at Openwave, and Brad Lassey, an active member of the Mozilla mobile development community from France Telecom R&D. The growing team will begin by updating the Gecko web rendering engine to work more cleanly on low-memory devices.
There are some interesting comments on Schrep’s blog, where readers are openly hoping that the project would focus on Symbian S60 devices first. Also, two readers have noted that anything less than full support for Ajax will render the project "useless." A fair assessment.
Here’s another bag of worms: Will a mobile version of Firefox pose a significant challenge to Opera’s growth on mobile devices? The Opera Mobile browser comes preloaded on many S60 and Windows Mobile devices, and it works on just about any smartphone. Opera Mini works on any phone with a data plan. Is Mozilla going to cause the Opera growth curve to level off?
