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Mozilla Is Eyeing Your Phone
Slatterz writes "Mozilla is planning to develop a browser for mobile phones by 2010. Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, has been laying out her plans for the organisation over the next two years. Baker also committed to expanding the role of Firefox and building on its market share, while developing new browser technology such as the Aurora project. Mozilla has already stated that it is working on a mobile version of Firefox, but has never set a timeframe for release."
Actually, they already have been working on a mobile version for years. Not much progress though...
Apple's Safari only comes with the iPod touch and the iPhone and cannot be used with normal phones.
Yes, that's right, that's why Nokia's phones all use it. Wait, no, that's not right.
when opera mobile is already out there and working fantastically? I very much doubt firefox will get its memory usage down enough to compete.
I am trolling
Apple's Safari only comes with the iPod touch and the iPhone and cannot be used with normal phones. Yes, that's right, that's why Nokia's phones all use it. Wait, no, that's not right.
You're right, it isn't. The Nokia phones most certainly do not use safari even though nokias browser does utilize webkit, the same rendering engine as safari and chrome. Webkit != safari.
Yep. In my experience it's memory that's key - FF3 will run quite snappily on a Pentium II if it's got >=512MB of memory.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
There are versions out already. The browser in my Nokia N800 is Mozilla based.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The new mozilla based mobile, based on current mozilla techno + some additions for mobile, is already available in alpha.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec
This is like Firefox with the ui completely redone.
It will also support extensions.
2010 is just 1.5 year away so having a non beta build for 2010 doesn't seem unrealistic.
I guess some optimisations made for mobile environnement will benefit everybody (like the optimization done for Firefox)
(and there's already a tracemonkey javascript for arm so this will be fast)
I'm in no doubt it will be a great software.
The only thing uncertain is if it will be shipped by default on some devices...
Nope.
The current version of Vista on new hardware is still causing performance issues. At least with our customer base.
And no you can actually put any version current version of Linux on even a P4 with intel graphics and have it work really well. My wife is running an old single core AMD system and Ubuntu runs just fine on it.
I would also say that I would bet that if you put Vista and OS/X on an older Mac Mini that OS/X would be more usable then Vista.
I don't think Vista sucks as bad as lot of people do but it really seems pointless.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That'll be sync with their desktop Mozilla browser.
you mean like Opera already does? WOW! what will they think of next?
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
The post that's referenced in the article is available on mozilla's newsgroup and was Mitchell just asking for feedback on our 2010 goals. We're still in the process of fleshing out those goals and we're trying to figure out how mobile plays a role in them.
Our mobile involvement is something that's going to take a while to get spun up, but it's not something that will take as long as people think it will take here.
First of all, Mozilla is the only browser solution that has a fully open source browser that's flexible and is multi-platform. Our code works on x86, x86_64, ARM, ppc, etc. We have the entire browser infrastructure in place as well - history, bookmarks, UI rendering, full networking stack - everything. And our engine is completely competitive in terms of our ability to execute on mobile platforms.
That being said it's important to understand that WebKit is not a browser. It's an HTML rendering part - an important part but everything else that goes around the browser is also huge and complex and hard to build. And everyone who has embedded WebKit has either had to borrow someone else's or build their own. So everyone has to re-invest to get the entire browser infrastructure that we already include. WebKit people have generally invested earlier, but we'll get there faster with a better solution that's tested against the real web.
Chrome is interesting too. It's essentially a big huge win32 app. It uses wininet for a lot of its networking and while the JavaScript engine is portable it's not as portable as Mozilla's new JS engine. Chrome has some neat stuff, but it's going to be a little while before it's up and running on the mac and linux. Chrome is basically built like Netscape 4.x was - native front ends for every platform. Porting pain.
Anyway, it's going to be a fun couple of years and I'm happy that Mozilla will be taking the dive into Mobile. We'll be able to bring a lot of the Firefox experience and community along with us.
We're looking forward to the day when you can walk into a store and ask for the phone with Firefox on it.