Firefox Mobile on the way
Gareth Halfacree, Bit-Tech.net, 10/22/2009
Firefox fans rejoice, for soon an actual release of Firefox Mobile will be making its way to your handset – as long as you’re running Android, Maemo, or Windows Mobile that is.
In an attempt to challenge the current dominance of Webkit-based mobile browsers, The Mozilla Foundation’s John Lilly has revealed to GigaOm that it is hoping to release a version of Fennec, the company’s mobile browser, for Nokia Maemo handsets as well as those running Android – both mobile-oriented Linux distributions – and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform.
The current version of Fennec – which is available in an early alpha form for Maemo devices such as Nokia’s latest N900 smartphone – is based on the Firefox 3.6 rendering engine, which is a step ahead of the engine used in the current desktop release of the browser. This technology means that when Fennec finally hits ‘phones, it will offer the a complete browsing experience – in Lilly’s words, “a browser that [does] everything – JavaScript, CSS, Flash, SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics], video and audio.”
While the choice of Android – a platform which is seeing rapid growth – and Maemo – which Lilly believes could see massive success outside the US – were made due to the flexibility of Linux as a development and testing platform, Windows Mobile is likely to see the most interest: offering users the option of synchronising their Windows desktop installation of Firefox with their mobile device.
When asked why other popular mobile platforms – in particular Nokia’s Symbian operating system as well as the extremely successful BlackBerry devices – weren’t being considered, Lilly explained that the company was shying away from developing a Java-based verison of its browser, preferring to develop in C++. Lilly also said that reliance of Java had slowed down their development for Android, until Google released “Android NDK which uses C/C++, and that is what we program in, so we are now looking at developing Firefox for Android.”
With a feature list that includes performance tweaks for ARM processors, full support for HTML5, and the option to install add-ons in the same way as the desktop edition, it’s clear that Mozilla could well be on to a winner with Fennec.
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- Firefox for Mobile 1.0 gets a release candidate Sebastian Anthony, Download Squad, 1/3/2010 Good news, Nokia users! if you’re fortunate enough to own one of those swish Maemo-powered...
- Firefox for mobile ‘days away’ from launch Jonathan Fildes, BBC News, 12/22/2009 The first mobile phone version of the popular web browser Firefox is “days away” from...
In: Android, Blackberry, Mobile Technology, Symbian · Tagged with: HTML5, Linux, Nokia