There is room to grow in the mobile browser market. While there are several options to pick from, most of them fall short of customer and user expectations. Mozilla said they are going to attempt to enter the fray and design a mobile browser that will “rock” the mobile web and coming soon mobile phones.

“People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it. Here's some information about what we're planning to do with hiring, technology, partnerships, and products, and how you can get involved. Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices,” said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's VP of engineering, in his blog on Tuesday.

With more than one hundred million active users, Firefox is popular. Mozilla thinks that bringing the open-source browser to the fragmented mobile market “will do the world some serious good.”

“A large portion of the world accesses the Internet from mobile devices, and this will become increasingly true over time (mobile devices outsell computers 20-1). Each Firefox install is an individual choice by a person to download something that didn't ship by default on their computer. Why not offer that option for mobile devices?” Schroepfer said.


“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. Through Joey, we've seen how the desktop and mobile browsing experiences can be bridged to build a better experience for both. Wouldn't it be great if your bookmarks, history, extensions, etc. from Firefox on your computer just worked on your phone?” he adds.

With that said, he officially 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.” Mozilla will ship a version of "Mobile Firefox" which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow developers a chance to build rich applications via XUL.

“Up until very recently device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up. Being able to leverage all the investments in the Mozilla platform across both desktops and devices is the right approach. There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation,” Schroepfer points out.


While it is unknown what devices Mobile Firefox will run on the news is positive all the same. However, one comment on the blog post makes a valid point. If the browser does not fully support AJAX and other emerging Web standards, then it will be “useless.”

Source:http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1364468.php/Coming_soon_to_your_mobile_phone_%96_Firefox