Mozilla Hitting 'Brick Walls' Getting Firefox on Phones

meteorit writes "Mozilla has been working on a mobile version of Firefox since last year, and is now looking to repeat the success of Firefox on the PC. Although development seems not to have been completed, it is known that informal negotiations have already started with mobile network operators. Firefox Mobile is scheduled to be launched by the end of the year and the inaugural version will be compatible with the Linux and Windows Mobile operating systems. Work is already underway to determine what the browser's UI will look like. In the meantime those negotiations seem to be hitting 'brick walls', as cellphone operators resist the intrusion of the open web onto their platforms."

Comments

It's important to read the article

[93 Escort Wagon]

One reason this walled garden approach benefits cellular operators is that they get paid both by subscribers and by content providers. With open Internet access, only subscribers pay. Another benefit is that their approach reduces use of limited 3G bandwidth, meaning carriers don't have to build a more robust network. I don't know if the blogger is confused himself or is deliberately muddying the waters - but very little of his argument applies to Firefox at all (even tangentially). He is hop-scotching around (such as the quote included above), making it hard to argue against because he seems to be jumping back and forth randomly between about ten different subjects.

So let's assume that the title of his little rant is indicative of what he thought he was writing about. Somehow he seems to be drawing the conclusion that, sans an open-source web browser, people aren't allowed to browse websites of their own choosing! I'd love to see Firefox on mobile platforms; but really - even my friends with Windows Mobile phones are checking their Gmail; I see them looking at all sorts of odd pages; and I have never heard them complain that their carrier won't let them visit any arbitrary page. I do hear them complaining about the crappy internet experience they're having, due to the poor design of the browser; but that's a completely different subject (and while Firefox could potentially address that, Safari already does - and it's got nothing to do with the openness of the browser, per se, anyway).

When the web was first getting onto mobile phones, I realize people weren't given free reign in their browsing habits - but c'mon, that was three or four years ago.

Re:Because

[RLiegh]

Not exactly, it's because mobile phone companies think that having complete platform control is a lot more important than allowing an open browser to upset their applecart.

And from their perspective -they're right. If you don't control the application you want to make sure that the people who do control it are either under your influence, or have similar goals. Open source isn't under their influence, and the goals of open source are diametrically opposite of the manufacturers'.

Re:As of now

[Brian Gordon]

I'm not a loyal anything user, but I really dislike the locked-down American cellphone situation. I'm not using my buying power to support apple/at&t for their nazi control over their device (even if you jailbreak it, you paid for the lock and so supported it) or any other platform, including opera mobile. Obviously I can't get by without a cellphone, but I just have a basic $20 KRAZR, no smart phone nonsense, and no putting $500 in the pockets of someone using it to get more locked down phones into the hands of the public.

Re:Because

[Billly Gates]

The consumers are left out of this equation.

Many will think enough is enough with paying $3 for some crappy midi file for a ring tone and want to run their phone like their pcs.

I for one refuse to buy high end phones for this reason. I want to run my own apps and not pay through the nose for their drm infested crappy software.

If you read my posts I am in favor of the free market and not some gnu zealot but when a company dictates how to use something I paid for and halts innovation I get mad.

I am not the only one and a truly free phone will attract all the developers and therefore bring all teh apps and cool games. After this their business model is done. You can't just lock a whole market up. Eventually someone like lets say google and their andriod sdk will come along and provide serious competition.

Re:Because

[Miseph]

I think it's a sign that capitalism is deeply and critically flawed that things are turning out the way they are. It's not a good sign for the free market that we have to resort to socialism in order to restore basic economic and consumer freedoms.

It's a sinking ship you cling to, just in case you hadn't noticed.

Re:Symbian OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Symbian, in C++, is deeply unpleasant to develop for, and very different to Palm, Windows CE or really, anything else.

The documentation is atrocious - there aren't many examples in it, and as opposed to Win32, where you can usually figure out how to use a function from the MSDN library's description of it, trying to do that will generally result in something that fails in an obscure way. As a rule the only sure way to find out how something is done is to find someone else who's already done it and try to figure out what they did that makes it work.

Symbian has only recently ported stdlib to it properly, in what I presume is an act of desperation to try and get people to develop for it. V9 solves the problem where all applications had to be DLLs with no global storage allowed, but it also adds a particularly paranoid code-signing system where your app has to be signed before it is possible to run it outside of the emulator.

That's been my experience, anyway. However - there is a whitepaper on how Opera was ported to Symbian. I can't find a freely accessible version of it right now, but it's a fascinating read and it illustrates full well why porting Mozilla would be very, very difficult.

it works in the rest of the world

[Colin Smith]

Capitalism is just buyers and sellers. If the buyers keep on buying crap from the sellers, they'll just keep being sold it. Especially when there are alternatives available.