The Mozilla Corporation is getting ready for a big push to develop a version of Firefox for mobile devices, according to a blog entry by Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla Corporation’s vice-president of engineering. Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices.
The future Mobile Firefox promises to be able to run extensions on mobile devices (which platforms will be supported is still undecided) and will support XUL for application development. To accomplish this, Mozilla is expanding its team of mobile contributors.
Schroepfer indicated that Mobile Firefox will not arrive before 2008 and will definitely not arrive before Firefox 3.
Meanwhile, the news is not so good for Minimo. Minimo was an experiment in mapping the desktop browser experience to a specific mobile context. While we don’t currently plan to develop that project further, it has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.
While this is good news, it’s still a little too far into the future to get excited (yet).