News
Mozilla ready to 'rock' mobile
Stuart O'Brien Oct 12 2007, 2:00pm
Development of mobile Firefox browser being ramped for 2008 expansion.
Writing in his blog, Mozilla Corp's VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer said the company was preparing to expand the browser's availability in mobile beyond its current Nokia N800 incarnation.
To that end Mozilla has hired Christian Sejersen, previously head of browsers at Openwave, and Brad Lassey from France Telecom's R&D department to head up work on the project.
It seems that the emergence of powerful smartphones - and in particular the iPhone - has convinced Mozilla that the time is right to devote more resources to mobile.
It says it will ship a version of Mobile Firefox that will be able to run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.
Schroepfer said: "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. The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear. If you weren't sure about this before you should be after the launch of the iPhone. We've seen through Mozilla on the Nokia N800 and Minimo that it is possible to build a great experience on devices by using the Mozilla code."
