Jay Sullivan doesn't want to kill off the app stores... yet.
Everybody knows about the browser wars in the desktop computing space: only this week, Microsoft was in the news again after promising to offer rivals alongside its Internet Explorer browser in its Windows OS.
Mobile has historically been rather different. Handsets shipped with one browser for their owners to use. Or not use, as was more often the case: ME readers will need no introduction to the painful history of the mobile internet.
It's changing though. iPhone taught the industry that mobile users would browse the web - and often - if the browsing experience was good enough. And rival smartphones are all coming out with their own whizzier browsers, increasingly based on the WebKit engine as iPhone's Safari.
Yet at the same time, the app store phenomenon is giving third-party browsers a shot at building an install base.
Witness the success of Opera Mini, which had nearly 40 million users in October. Skyfire is another browser that's got plenty of media attention, if not quite the numbers boasted about by Opera.
And now, enter Mozilla with the first mobile version of its Firefox browser, which has more than 330 million users on desktop and claims a market share of 25%.
Firefox for Mobile is currently in beta 5 for Nokia's N900, with a release candidate expected in the next few weeks. ME talked to Jay Sullivan, VP of mobile at Mozilla, to find out more.
Built on the same engine as Firefox 3.6 on the desktop, it includes the company's modestly-named Awesome Bar to speed up URL entry; allows users to synchronise their bookmarks, history, tabs and passwords with the desktop version via an add-on called Weave Sync; and claims to have the fastest JavaScript engine of any mobile browser.
Oh, and Weave Sync isn't the only add-on - the term means widgets that add new functionality to the browser.
"The add-ons are one of the things that makes Firefox pretty compelling for users on the desktop, and we have thousands of add-ons available for that, and 1.6 billion add-on downloads," says Sullivan.
"The mobile browser supports add-ons, and while we haven't really pushed this with developers, we're already seeing some add-ons that are specifically tuned for mobile, taking into account location or the touchscreen."
For developers, Sullivan says Mozilla's aim is to save them from the notion of "a dumbed-down mobile web", by letting them create rich websites and applications using standard technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
Isn't there a place for websites optimised specifically for phones though? The browser and hardware may be powerful, but the screen is still much smaller than a desktop monitor. Panning and zooming can be wearing compared to using, say, one of the slick iPhone-optimised sites like those for BBC News or The Guardian.
"What we mean when we talk about there really being one web is that websites should be able to use real web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as opposed to the situation we had a few years ago when people had to build in WML script, and later XHTML Mobile Profile," he says.
"One web to us means there's one set of standards that you can follow and you know they're going to work, but the second piece is 'what is the user experience?'."
In other words, Mozilla isn't saying websites have to be the same on desktop and mobile - just that they should use the same technologies. "There is a false intellectual purity around the full web," he continues.
"If I'm a user and go to a full web page from my phone that's exactly as it is on my desktop, with 20 Flash ads and all sorts of animations... Desktop screens are actually getting bigger, and so you can squish that down, but is it really helpful to have to zoom in and out and scroll around, and where links are so small that you have to zoom in to click them? I think we'll see more people designing things that are finger-friendly. We'll see more sophistication reflecting usage on the go."
He cites the example of a motoring insurance firm that might have an all-bells-and-whistles website, but might strip that down to a few buttons on its mobile site, optimised for the fact that if someone's visiting a car insurance site from their phone, it's much more likely they've had an accident or need roadside assistance.
Talking of false intellectual purity, what about the debate about native downloadable apps versus web apps on mobile? App stores reign supreme at the moment, but several companies - Google in particular - are already flying the flag for the mobile web taking over in a year or two's time.
Sullivan is wary of being misconstrued on this subject - having just had some quotes from a separate interview blown up into 'Firefox Mobile kills the app store!'. "That's exactly what I'm trying not to say!" he laughs.
"It's not really the web versus the app store. Developers want to get as close to the metal as they can, and the trade off now is that if you want to do that - access location or the camera and things like that - you have to write native applications."
However, he points out that this is challenging for developers looking to release apps for five, six or seven platforms, each of which has their own developer tools and coding languages, not to mention app store submission policies.
"If they can write these things in HTML and JavaScript, and the distribution mechanism is the URL, they're back in control," he says.
"But we have to get the capabilities in there. We're not under any illusions about the Web taking over next week. But in time I think we'll get an 80/20 rule and see things play out like they have on the desktop. There, 80% of the things you want to do are in the browser, but a few years ago you used native apps for almost ...
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Right now, Firefox Mobile does support some native APIs, giving developers access to location, device orientation and local storage. Sullivan thinks the latter is important, as it'll allow web apps that can be run offline even when someone's out of mobile reception.
Over time, Mozilla plans to add to these capabilities - for example, the ability to see a live camera feed inside a web page, for augmented reality uses.
With version 1.0 for the N900 done and dusted, how will Firefox Mobile evolve? Sullivan says Mozilla started with that handset because it wanted to create "a complete experience, not something that was stripped down". However, other handsets will come.
"We're working on Windows Mobile and Android, so 2010 will see us come out on more platforms," he says. "We're also looking at support for multi-touch as that becomes available on more phones, and also haptic feedback. We've also been working on a project called Jetpack, which is new add-on framework to make it even easier to develop add-ons."
Support for HTML 5 features is also on the way, including the WebGL standard, which will allow rich hardware-accelerated graphics to be displayed in mobile browsers running on handsets with the right kit inside.
One last question though: distribution. A few years ago, distributing a mobile browser was nigh-on impossible without deals with handset manufacturers and/or operators. Yet in the desktop world, the overwhelming majority of Firefox's 330 million users have downloaded the browser themselves rather than got it with their PC.
"That would have been a tricky proposition on mobile a couple of years ago, but because of app stores becoming such a focus, users are more comfortable with the idea that you can download something to your phone," he says.
"We think direct distribution to consumers will work well for us here, but we are also interested in doing bundling. Even knowing people will download, it's nice to have an icon right there in the homescreen, so we're going to experiment with both. We'll do okay either way."
