Mozilla's mobile Firefox could be available by year-end

You are one of 8 million users who just downloaded Firefox 3.0. But are you ready for Firefox for mobile?

Later this summer, Mozilla hopes to unveil an alpha release of a mobile version of the popular desktop Web browser. A beta release could be available by year-end. The development project for mobile Firefox, with the code name Fennec (a species of fox), was launched in October 2007. It promises to deliver in open source a full, power-efficient Web-browsing capability for smartphones and other mobile devices.

Mobile browsing, at least in the United States, was transformed by Apple's iPhone, with its touchscreen user interface and on-board, proprietary Safari browser. Though not the first full mobile browser (Opera Mobile was one forerunner), Safari threw a dramatic light on Web access from handhelds.

"With the iPhone, people have a sense that they can or should be able to browse the full Web," says Jay Sullivan, vice president of mobile for Mozilla. "We're in that camp: We're going for the full Web."

The Safari way

Unlike many other early mobile browsers, Safari can access existing Web sites directly, instead of sites with content stripped down and tailored for the small screens and keyboards of handhelds. It can give full access to some Microsoft SharePoint sites, for example. In addition, Safari's touch interface makes it easier for users to manipulate Web pages.

Mobile Firefox is one of several efforts to bring the full Web to mobile devices, a major step forward from the so-called microbrowsers that for the most part have made surfing the Web on a handheld a cumbersome, frustrating process. Start-up Skyfire Labs and Bitstream's ThunderHawk are two other efforts, both of which run the browser instance on a server.

Mobile Firefox wants to outstrip Safari in ease of use and performance while opening up the browser so users can extend its features as dramatically and easily as they can today with the desktop product. "It's for Web sites that people [today] are living in and working with," Sullivan says. "People browsing the Web from a mobile device don't expect an 'alternative universe' which lacks features they're used to."

The desktop Firefox

The first step is using the just-released desktop Firefox 3.0. Users will find many of the same features in the mobile browser, notably the new, "awesome bar," which is a vastly smarter URL box that can be used to do keyword searches of your URL history and bookmarks. Firefox 3.0 also includes improved security and uses vastly less memory than Firefox 2.0. The awesome bar will be even more important on the phone, because typing with a phone keypad is so laborious, Sullivan says.

The core of all this innovation is the heart of mobile Firefox. The mobile browser will use the same core HTML Gecko rendering engine that's found in desktop Firefox, with full JavaScript capability and AJAX (a set of tools and features for building interactive Web applications). Gecko is also used in the ThunderHawk mobile browser, and the browser Nokia developed for its Nokia N810 Internet tablet.