Firefox coming to your mobile

Author: Phil Cogar
Published: 12th October 2007
Comments (8) Stumble
Firefox on your mobile? Not if you own an older device.

Firefox on your mobile? Not if you own an older device.

Mozilla's Firefox web browser could be on your mobile in the near future. A blog posting by Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, says that the company is working on mobile version after seeing great success on the Nokia N800 and Minimo.

A growth in the amount of mobile users that access that web through their devices has spurred the development. The company plans to make the mobile version capable of running Firefox extensions as well as enabling developers to build applications using XUL.

Don't expect to find the browser on your run of the mill mobile though - it's going to require more than 64MB of RAM and a fast processor just to run how they want it. Schroefer lets on that he would like to see Firefox on future mobiles that are more powerful than the iPhone.

An expansion to the development team is already in the works. Christian Sejersen, former head of browsers at Openwave, and Brad Lassey, formerly from France Telecom R&D, have already joined up to the team. Schroefer is also looking for new members as well to aid in the development of the browser.

Mozilla is a little late making headway into the mobile market. Opera has been available on mobiles for some time now and has recently released version 8.65.

The first thing that popped into my head when I read this was: will Firefox eat up all of the system resources on my mobile like it does on my PC at times? Hopefully the development team will be able to keep the system footprint very small.

Glad to see that Firefox is coming to your mobile sometime in the future or will you just stick with the default browser? Leave your thoughts and comments over in the forums.
Quote voidboid 12th October 2007, 09:32
Minimo was so clunky, slow and quite buggy on my WM6 phone... if the new browser addresses these issues I'll be happy. Pocket IE is terrible (but works quite reliably), which leaves Opera as the only viable alternative...
Quote riggs 12th October 2007, 09:47
Meh...great if you've got a fast PDA style phone, but for the time being I'll stick with Opera Mobile - runs fine on a SE K800i.
Quote D3s3rt_F0x 12th October 2007, 10:12
Could be something there doing with google for there own phone OS as posted the other day on here
Quote Hamish 12th October 2007, 10:23
wonder if they're going to just go with a normal type browser or one of the zoomy ones like safari on the iphone and the Deepfish browser MS are working on
Quote <A88> 12th October 2007, 10:29
Deepfish hasn't been updated for yonks...either MS are prepping a new IE for WM7 when it comes out next year or they've dropped the project completely. Opera Mobile is a pretty decent browser, it just requires me to go to the Midlets group first before opening it, making it a lot more hassle to get to.

<A88>
Quote p3n 12th October 2007, 10:50
Boy is there a need for a decent mobile browser, I doubt this generation of 'smartphones' will see one though (although safari on the iphone looks good apart from having no flash support)
Quote The_Beast 12th October 2007, 22:35
sweet, I love firefox
Quote cyrilthefish 12th October 2007, 23:06
One thing needs verifying here:

does it need a device with 64mb ram or actually need 64 mb ram?
i'm 90% sure it's the former, which would count for pretty much every current device :)

As a very heavy user of web-browsing on PDAs i'm looking forward to this...

In my personal opinion for current WM devices:
IE: fastest, but by far the most feature-bare browser (you want to do such things as 'save file/link as'? pfft! no chance)
Minimo: technically better, as it renders pages much better than IE but 4x as slow and takes insane amounts of RAM (about 40% of the available on my MDA)
opera: for some reason has never worked on any of my PDAs o.O
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