Mike Schroepfer has announced that Mobile Firefox is coming in a big way.
When you think of a mobile browser, you may first think about Opera and WebKit, but Mozilla wants to change this. We have already seen the seeds of change as Mike points out:
You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices.
Mike announced:
- Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.
- We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox†which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.
- Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:
- Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
- Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.
It seems like more and more people are looking at the number of phones out there versus computers and want to jump in.
Should Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, iPhone Web Browser and Microsoft Deepfish developers be worried already? Safari for iPhone is locked to the iPhone, which doesn't let you install third-party applications. Opera Mini (and to an extent Deepfish) is aimed at low-end devices that can't run a full browser. So I'd say that no, they don't have anything to worry about.
Opera Mobile, perhaps. Either way, we're looking at a year or two out, because this initiative is tied to the Mozilla2 overhaul, which means it'll be either contemporary with or after Firefox 4.
Of course, that also means that the average phone, by the time this comes out, may be able to handle full browsers like Opera Mobile, so things like Deepfish and Opera Mini might be on their way out. It's hard to say.
