They Shrunk My Firefox! Mozilla Shows off Mobile Mockups
As we mentioned a while back, Mozilla is working on a mobile version of Firefox and now the company has taken the wraps off some of its initial design ideas, offering a first glimpse of what mobile Firefox may look like.
Keep in mind that this preview is largely intended to gather community feedback, and that the final release of Firefox mobile may well be very different. The final version Firefox mobile is expect to arrive sometime in late 2008.
The initial design reveals that Mozilla has forked the project slightly. One design clearly targets touch screen devices, like the iPhone or other smart PDA-style devices. A second design is made for more traditional phones where the screen is smaller and navigation is limited to the keyboard.
So far, there’s no word from Mozilla on whether or not they plan to build an
iPhone-specific version to take advantage of pinch zooming or any of
the other finger gesture features on the iPhone.
The possibility of Firefox on the iPhone aside, the touch screen interface is still the more interesting of the two. It looks remarkably similar to Apple’s mobile version of Safari, though it borrows some ideas from Firefox 3 as well. The title bar is relatively simple with a stop/reload button, an address/search bar and the same star-bookmarking button found in the Firefox 3 betas.
The star button itself has a dual actions: one tap shows a list of your bookmarks, while a double tap will bookmark the current page. Although it hasn’t been included in these early mockups, it seems that bookmark syncing will happen through the recently announced Weave project.
As with mobile Safari, the page navigation is at the bottom of the screen with back/forward buttons as well as zoom controls and a tab switch button with previews. The tab switching button brings up a 2×2 grid of your open tabs with any additional tabs requiring a second click to page through.
The non-touch screen version of mobile Firefox is, as you might expect, somewhat more barebones, though it does feature a very nice scroll/zoom interface for keypad navigation.
Of course for many the real appeal of Mobile Firefox will lie with the extensions and so far the mockups haven’t revealed any details about how extensions will be installed or managed.
Still, despite being somewhat limited, the early preview shows the Firefox mobile is well under way and it looks quite nice so far. If you’d like to play round with the mobile interface, the XUL mockups are available for download in both touchscreen and normal versions.
[via Mozilla Links]
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