Mozilla: Firefox for mobile phones is coming

by Brad Linder on October 10, 2007 at 10:00 AM

Mozilla JoeyWe've known Mozilla had big plans for the mobile space for a while now. But we were a bit disappointed when Mozilla announced their first major Mobile offering back in August. Joey is basically just a web clipping service that lets you save web content using your desktop Firefox browser and access it from any old mobile browser. We were hoping to see a mobile version of Firefox.

Well, sometimes dreams do come true. Mozilla's Mike Schroepfer writes on his blog that work is underway to create a version of Firefox for mobile phones. There aren't a ton of details yet, but here's what we can tell you:
  • Mozilla is adding mobile devices to the list of "first-class" development platforms
  • Mobile Firefox will be able to run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow third party development via XUL
  • Mozilla is expanding its team of mobile contributors
  • Development on Joey will continue
  • Don't expect further Minimo development
  • Mobile Firefox will ship after Firefox 3
Mozilla hasn't picked the target platforms yet. So there's no word whether you'll be able to run Firefox on Palm, Windows Mobile, or Symbian devices. Considering the iPhone is still officially a locked device, we doubt you'll see an official version for iPhone anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some industrious open source hacker won't find a way to run Mobile Firefox on the iPhone.

Tags: firefox, mobile-browsing, mobile-firefox, mobileminute, opensource, web-browser