Now that Mozilla has cemented its browser footprint on computers with over 100 million active Firefox users, the company has set its sights on the next frontier: mobile devices. The company’s vice president of engineering, Mark Schroepfer, broke the news about an upcoming mobile version of Firefox on Tuesday via his blog.
“We are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices,” he wrote. To do this, the company will release a version of Mobile Firefox with all the capabilities of its desktop brother, including using the same downloadable extensions and running XUL applications.
Among the reasons for the planned expansion are the expanding market for mobile devices and their rapidly accelerating processing power. According to Schroepfer, mobile devices already outsell computers by 20 to one, making them a fertile ground for Mozilla’s growth. Likewise, new chips from upcoming chips from Intel and ARM promise to crank mobile power ever higher, which Schroepfer believes will be crucial for delivering the browsing experience customers expect, coming from a desktop background.
A Firefox-based browser already exists for the Nokia N800, and both Minimo and Joey offer experimental versions of a mobile Firefox. Although Schroepfer made no hard deadlines for the real thing, he did estimate that it would certainly not arrive anytime before 2008.
