Mozilla Firefox is used by over 30% of the people on the web and is the second most popular browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which currently has just over 55% of the market. ( Stat Counter ) Mozilla have announced that they are on the final stretch to completing its latest version of the browser for mobile phones.
Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of mobile said “Our goal is to have a release candidate next week,” “If things go smoothly, we’ll have a (final) version out in the next few weeks,” with the debut planned for this year, he later added.
While Firefox has become Microsoft’s main competitor in the browser battle, mobile phone browsers which have really been becoming increasingly more popular, are an area Mozilla have yet to make an impact in. Currently there is an open-source project called Webkit, which is the dominant platform powering browsers on mobile devices like the Droid, iPhone and Palm Pre. As well as mobile phones running Google’s Android platform and now Blackberry’s are adopting it too.
The first mobile Firefox version will run on Nokia’s powerful new N900, a $569 mobile phone that uses Nokia’s Linux based Maemo operating system. Mozilla have also said a Windows Mobile version of the browser is set to arrive sometime next year as well and they’ve also begun work on a Google Android version since Google have released a native development kit.
This mobile version of Firefox will is also based on the same code as the existing Firefox 3.6 and since it holds over 30% of the market, its brand name is fairly familiar among users. It also has a pretty cool feature in it called Weave, this allows mobile Firefox to synchronize its bookmarks, passwords, and even open tabs with the desktop version of the browser. What’s more, Firefox for the N900 can also run many Firefox extensions, 30 or so at the moment.
Whats more Firefox now has built in geolocation, which lets a Web application tap into the phone’s services to figure out where a user is and, for example, show a map of the nearest pizza shops. Also included is support for accelerometers, which detect the phones orientation.
And according to Sullivan there is more on the way in 2010:
• Support for haptic feedback, such as the phone vibrating when a virtual keyboard key is tapped.
• Support for multitouch displays for a more sophisticated user interface.
• The ability to control a camera.
• Support for Electrolysis, Mozilla’s project to split tasks such as the user interface, tabs, and plug-ins into separate processes. That improves stability and performance, he said.
• Support for JetPack, Mozilla’s next-generation extensions system.
• Integration of the Weave synchronization software so it’s no longer a plug-in.
• Support for WebGL, an interface to provide browsers with accelerated 3D graphics.
• Faster execution of JavaScript programs that are common and increasingly powerful on the Web.
So Mobile Firefox is looking very promising, what do you think about it?
Let us know in the comments
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