Mozilla For Your Mobile... Its Coming Soon..

In what is probably a long overdue announcement, Mozilla has indicated that it is working on a version of Firefox that will be designed for mobile phones and will make its maiden appearance sometime in 2008. To achieve this ambitious project, it has hired two very high profile mobile developers for this project i.e. Christian Sejersen who will head up engineering and development of the browser, and France Telecom researcher Brad Lassey who will also be part of the same team.

The new mobile browser will operate much like the desktop version and will include support for XUL and extensions. Mozilla is also looking into making the browser portable i.e. where a user could easily port preferences, bookmarks, and so forth between the mobile and the desktop.
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The iPhone, Apple Inc.'s popular new mobile phone, in part contributed to the renewed interest in mobile browsing at Mozilla. "The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear," Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla Corp. wrote in his blog on Tuesday. "If you weren't sure about this before, you should be after the launch of the iPhone."

As Mozilla continues to develop Mozilla2, the second version of the platform on which Firefox is built, it will add mobile devices as a category. That means developers of Mozilla2, which is expected to be complete in early 2009, will keep mobile phones in mind as they build the new platform, Schroepfer wrote.

He didn't get more specific on a release date for the mobile browser other than to say "not before 2008." Schroepfer also said Mozilla hadn't yet decided which mobile phones the browser would work on.

Depending on compatibility, Mozilla could face competition from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Apple that include their own browsers in phones running their operating systems, as well as from third parties such as Opera Software ASA that have been fine-tuning their mobile browsers for years now.

The announcement comes after the release earlier this year of a new version of Minimo, a Mozilla-based mobile browser for Windows Mobile devices. A few months prior to the release, the lead developer of Minimo said he wouldn't be spending much time on the project in the future. On Tuesday, Schroepfer said that there are no plans to further develop Minimo.

Mozilla also offers Joey, a project in development that lets users clip and save text, photos, videos and other content while using a PC and then access that content through a browser on a cell phone.

Mozilla is also involved with a group of companies including Arm Ltd. and MontaVista Software Inc. that is developing an open-source Linux-based platform for devices that are bigger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop. Mozilla is developing a browser for the platform and has already built one for a similar device, the N800, from Nokia Corp.

The new Mozilla hires who will contribute to the mobile Firefox initiative are Christian Sejersen, who recently worked for Openwave Systems Inc., and Brad Lassey, who worked for France Telecom R&D, which has been very active in mobile Linux initiatives.

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