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Firefox believes Android and Maemo will be key mobile OSs

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 19 October, 2009

READ MORE: Mozilla | Applications (Browser) | iPhone | Android | Linux

The mobile browser world is a tough one - even as the experience becomes far more usable, the smartphone OS majors increasingly want to push their own browsers. Opera is holding onto significant market share, partly with the strength of its compression technology, and partly by focusing heavily on the midrange user base. The other big non-aligned challenger could be Mozilla, with Fennec, the smartphone version of Firefox, and the organization may be planning to be the latest to run the gauntlet of the iPhone's approval process.

In April, Mozilla said it would make an iPhone browser, but then seemed to change its mind, perhaps because of the likely problems with being admitted into the Apple sanctum, given the competitive issues with the phonemaker's own Safari. But like Adobe, which recently announced iPhone tools even while it has failed to get its fully fledged Flash systems onto the Apple device, Mozilla may be taking a sideways route - even while its major mobile bets will be Android and Maemo, both Linux-based.

According to Om Malik, who interviewed Mozilla CEO John Lilly for his GigaOm blog, the group is hinting at something mysterious for the iPhone. "Mozilla will release an app to the iPhone App Store in the next few weeks," Lilly told Malik. "It'll surprise people." GigaOm speculates that the app will include Mozilla's Weave, a way to upload personal browser preferences to the firm's servers and access them from any device; and The Awesome Bar, a way to get access to history and bookmarks by typing into the URL bar. Weave would be competitive with Apple's dot.mac service.

Lilly admitted Firefox was behind WebKit-based browsers on the mobile platform but said at the recent Play conference: "Sure, we are behind, but we didn't want to do a browser that didn't do the whole web. We wanted to build a browser that did everything - Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio. What that meant was we had to wait for a while for devices to get better to handle this modern browser." Fennec is based on the Firefox 3.6 engine, which is not even available on the PC yet.

Firefox is running on the new Nokia N900 and has been much praised by previewers for its PC-like qualities. Lilly is supportive of Nokia Maemo, despite its nascent base, because it is a modern OS "built with the internet in mind". After Maemo, Fennec will appear for Windows Mobile and Android. Lilly is less interested in Java-based platforms like BlackBerry, and far more positive about Android now that it uses C/C++ as well as Java. "That is what we program in, so we are now looking at developing Firefox for Android," said the company.