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."

Comments

2010?

[rallymatte]

They will be left so far behind.
Apple's safari is already an amazing browser for mobile phones.
I'm sure that Google won't take as long as 2010 to come out with a mobile version of Chrome.
Opera might not be the best browser for mobile phones, but it's pretty decent.
IMHO I think Mozilla needs to get their mobile browser out a little bit earlier than that. Of course it's a good strategy to not release the software until it's ready, but how far behind are they ready to get?

Re:2010?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's Safari only comes with the iPod touch and the iPhone and cannot be used with normal phones.
Google Chrome for phones will take far longer to come as they still have to iron out bugs in their desktop version, which is their main focus, before they will release a mobile version.
Opera is not very customizable and I for one hate the interface.

I believe this is a good step by Mozilla and I would far rather have a good version and wait a bit longer than have a buggy version but have it earlier. Anyways, I'm sure they will have beta versions released far earlier than that for early adopters such as you.

Re:2010?

[BrokenHalo]

Well, they can take their time as far as I'm concerned. I can think of more pleasant and productive ways to spend my time than trying to navigate and strain my eyes reading webpages on those tiny screens.

I can endure it for a quick email or weather report, but otherwise I'll just wait a little while until I get an opportunity to use a proper computer.

Re:2010?

[TheRaven64]

Safari only comes with iPhones, but WebKit is running on Linux (GTK and Qt), Series-60 (Symbian) and even Wince devices. It's pretty hard to find a device that can't run some form of WebKit browser these days, and all of them benefit from the work that other WebKit contributors (Apple, Nokia, Adobe, Google, etc). Mozilla is now saying that WebKit will have two years with no competition in the fastest-growing segment of the market.

This is exactly the reason why Mozilla lost the first browser war. After Netscape 4 (which wasn't a great product), development was handed over to the Mozilla group. Between Netscape 4.8 (1998) and Mozilla 1.0 (2002) there was a four year gap. By the end of this time, the only people using Netscape / Mozilla were the people with no other options - even a lot of Linux / BSD users had gone to Opera - and it's taken them six years to claw back a 15% share in a market where they used to be ubiquitous. In 2010, every mobile device will come with a web browser (most do already), be it Opera, Pocket IE, or something WebKit based. Mozilla will need to give people a really compelling reason to move to their new browser.

Re:2010?

[Firehed]

It seems to me that a mobile version of Chrome would end up almost easier than the desktop version. Since you can only view one page (or tab, if you will) at a time on a mobile browser, the whole threading issue that actually makes Chrome fairly unique pretty much goes away. Of course there's also the new Javascript engine which will end up being fairly critical on mobile phones, especially as phones and what we expect to do with them advances.

I always like to see more options available for people, but I don't really see a whole lot of difference on the user's side of things between different mobile browsers provided they all render HTML and CSS the same way (as Gecko and Webkit finally do). It really just comes down to whose affiliate link gets stuck in the google search URL. Aside from just slow rendering in general (which is mostly a hardware limitation), my only real complaint about Safari on the iPhone is a lack of an adblocker, and that's only for the bandwidth savings (if nothing else, it would be nice if it could delay the requests for content that match the filterset.g list until all of the content from the original domain is downloaded just to speed up progressive rendering of the actual content).

Unlike on my desktop, I really don't care tremendously which browser I'm using on a mobile device, unless one is significantly faster than the other. The UI will mostly be device/OS-dependent, and most extensions and/or plugins are pretty much impossible at least logistically (adblock again really being the only thing that you could implement and would make sense to do). If Mozilla produces a mobile browser then more power to them, but they have to provide a benefit over what's already in place in order to get people to switch and quite frankly I don't see it happening on a handset. I live and die by my Firefox extensions on the desktop, but... we'll see, I guess.

Well I don't know...

[RuBLed]

By 2010, there would be mobile phones/devices that would have a larger screen resolution and more processing power (and RAM). As technologies advance, the problem is getting less and less about cramming info on a small screen and more about delivering the same featureset of the desktop variants to a mobile device.

So I guess beyond 2010, they should just port the desktop code to whatever platform mobile devices run on.

That is unless we don't try to dream and reinvent the simple web browsing so that it would take all your PC's resources and ask for your firstborn.

Re:Well I don't know...

[Firehed]

Could we drop this already? Any computer is going to be unhappy when you give it a brand-new OS for its sixth birthday (unless the OS is a command-line version of Linux). Vista has its share of problems and then some, but performance has never once been one of them in my experience.

Then again, I don't buy off the shelf PCs bundled with all sorts of sluggish crapware. I buy overpriced PCs bundled with shiny, snobbish crapware! Yes, I'm a Mac user, and while MS couldn't pay me to switch back, I'm still defending Vista (is that the smell of burnt karma in the morning?)

Re:Who'd ever use this...

[TheRaven64]

Competing with Opera Mobile is easy. Opera costs money. If you want to ship Opera with your device, you need to pay for it. It's not much, but it eats away at your profits. In contrast, a Mozilla browser will be free for device manufacturers to install. The real competitor is WebKit. Device manufacturers (e.g. Nokia) already have this ported to small form-factor devices (I can run a WebKit browser on my phone with a 200MHz ARM chip and 32MB of RAM, although the screen is so small that it's not really worth bothering with). Because WebKit's public APIs are cleaner than Gecko's, it's easy for device builders to write a custom browser around it and produce an integrated UI with a rendering engine that other people are spending a lot of money developing.

Re:opera mini?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be too difficult to install a similar kind of caching/compressing proxy on your own machine (either at home or on a proper server in a datacenter, whatever), and that would not only do what Opera Mini does but it also would do in a private way, win win.

Oh, that doesn't cater to noobs, I hear you say ? Well, how about "use Mozilla's server by default, but with the freedom to change it if you want" ? Also full of win.

Re:Who'd ever use this...

[Stooshie]

I downloaded and installed opera mobile for nothing on my phone (well the bandwidth, but no charge for opera itself).

Focus on interface

[shmmeee]

I've used Nokia's Webkit based browser, Opera Mini and Opera, Pocket IE and the iPhone's Safari browser and one thing is quite obvious to me. You can't replicate all the functionality of today's web without a mouse like device. The iPhone comes closest, but the inability to move just the mouse pointer to hover over things means many menu systems and some Flash games aren't usable. IMHO, solve the mouse problem and you solve mobile browsers. The technical ability to do stuff will come as mobiles catch up to PCs, but there will always be a "mobile web" and a "desktop web" until the interface catches up.