Mozilla is expanding development of Firefox for Android with new efforts to improve its performance, lower its power consumption, adapt it for tablets–and keep the browser maker relevant in the hottest area of computing.
Firefox is the second-most widely used browser on computers, but things are different in the mobile arena. There, Firefox is at a serious disadvantage compared to mobile browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Google’s unbranded Android browser that are built into the operating systems.
Mozilla, by comparison, must convince people or phone makers to install Firefox, and even then restrictions keep it off several mobile operating systems.
But Mozilla clearly has recognized that mobile computing is rapidly expanding beyond the niche of technophiles and wealthy folks who want a high-status phone. Firefox won’t have an easy time carving a place for itself on new mobile devices, but Mozilla is doing its darndest to build a browser that will attract users.
One illustration: When Mozilla programmer Dave Mandelin began an active discussion about what Firefox needs to run better on ARM processors, which dominate the phone and tablet market, a broad, active discussion took off. Mandelin wasn’t very gentle.
“If you have a powerful device, Firefox performance is in many ways pretty good. But UI [user interface] responsiveness and memory usage seem to be in pretty bad shape,” Mandelin said. “So we need to get better measurements and start improving performance in those areas, today.”
And Mozilla, barred from bringing its browser to major mobile operating systems such as Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, is moving beyond browsers, too.
“Smartphones and tablets are where the next billion people will expect their personalized experience to be available to them anytime, anywhere,” Mozilla said in its vision statement that Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan published earlier this year. “To significantly affect Internet life in the future, we will have to deliver value on major OSes, whether we are allowed to ship our own browser engine or not.”
Getting a Fennec foothold
That operating system barrier has made it harder for Firefox for mobile, code-named Fennec, to gain a foothold.
The two initial operating systems for Fennec were Maemo from Nokia and Windows Mobile from Microsoft. Maemo became MeeGo when Nokia merged the effort with Intel’s mobile Linux project, but through a major Nokia restructuring, MeeGo has been consigned to oblivion.
Microsoft, meanwhile, overhauled Windows Mobile 6.5 to produce Windows Phone 7–and one aspect of that shift is the removal of the software interfaces necessary to run Firefox.
Another possible avenue, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry operating system, doesn’t look promising, either. Although RIM started a closed beta test of a native developer kit (NDK) last week for BlackBerry tablets, the company told CNET in a statement that won’t enable browsers such as Firefox, as it’s currently engineered, on phones.
“We do not have any plans to bring an NDK to the BlackBerry OS today,” the company said in a statement. “It would have to be written in Java to run on our platform. Opera, Bolt, and other browsers have been ported to the BlackBerry smartphone platform to date.” More
