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Mobile Firefox likely to work on Symbian

October 15th, 2007

Mozilla’s mobile Firefox browser, which the company said earlier this week is in the works, will likely be available for phones running Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux operating systems, a developer working on the project said.

Windows Mobile and Linux phones are likely initial candidates for the browser, in part because those operating systems share code with their corresponding operating systems on computers, making it easier to build the mobile version of the browser, said Doug Turner, a Mozilla engineer working on the mobile project.

Symbian, however, is totally different from any of the desktop operating systems so would require more work, he said. “But since Symbian has such a wide market it may make sense to do that,” he said. Symbian, which runs on Nokia Corp.’s phones, has the bulk of smartphone market share, even though its presence in the U.S. is small.

Last Tuesday, Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer announced on his blog that the company had decided to develop a new mobile version of Firefox. He said Mozilla hadn’t determined which phones the browser would work on. Judging from the comments left after the post, a Symbian version of the browser is in big demand.

Regardless of the way that Mozilla prioritises Firefox mobile compatibility, the beauty of Firefox is that it’s open, Turner said. “It’s not like Mozilla needs to bless someone to build something,” he said. Developers will be free to build Firefox mobile for Symbian, or any other mobile operating system, if Mozilla doesn’t. That’s happened in the desktop environment, where developers have built Firefox browsers for very old operating systems, he said.

The browser will be based on Mozilla2, the new Mozilla platform expected to come out in 2009. By then, a number of other mobile browsers including Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari will have been available for years.

Mozilla isn’t worried about the competition, though. Internet Explorer once had nearly all of the market share in the PC, Turner noted. “So it’s not like we haven’t been in this fight before,” he said.

Plus, the smart phone market is still relatively small, so Mozilla actually won’t be late to market, said Chris Hazelton, an analyst with IDC. In 2006, smartphones made up about eight percent of the market, he said.

Via Reseller.co.nz

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