Concepts for a version of Firefox (designed to run on mobile phones), have been kicking about for a bit, but according to Engadget Mobile, screenshots have emerged of the alpha version (ie/ the very first ever build, with gaping holes and loads still to do), which should be arriving sooner than everyone expected.
At the minute, it seems fairly certain Mozilla’ll concentrate on getting it working Windows Mobile phones, but after that we may very well see preproduction versions appearing for other systems, and other mobile phones (Symbian Foundation springs immediately to mind…)
There’s one thing (as well as the obvious enhanced browsing experience, with things like finger control etc) that I reckon should be a massive selling point for Firefox on mobile phones (or Fennec, as we should probably call it, since Mozilla do): add-ons. If they can get add-ons working on your mobile phone as well as they do on your PC (and there’s rumours they plan to), then this could be the mobile browser par excellence. And let’s not forget that this new pre-release version, even in this early form, got 88/100 on the Acid3 Test (designed to test how good web browsers are).
It’s not going to be without competition, though. Lots of mobile phones nowadays access the internet, quite often at broadband speeds (with HSDPA), so the market for mobile browsers is, it’s fair to say, pretty cut-throat. So, what competition can Firefox Mobile (sorry, I tried, but I prefer that name to Fennec) expect?
The big name in the mobile browser world is Opera. You may remember the name, because when I got back off holiday I gushed like a fanboy about the wonders of Opera Mini 4.1, justifiably so, because it rocks. It’s the best web browser I’ve ever used on a mobile phone. Potentially more awesome, though, is its big brother, the more recent Opera Mobile 9.5 (the one that’s supposed to come as standard on the Sony Ericsson X1), which takes the brilliance of Opera Mini, adds in tabbed browsing, and generally acts all sleeker and sexier.
Or, basically, it does the same trick as Safari on the iPhone, another competitor against Firefox Mobile (it’ll be interesting to see if Firefox will make it to the iPhone, given that it replicates and could potentially replace the iPhone’s own browser… I wonder if Apple would let that one through…)
Then you’ve got the one that’s a bit of a stalking horse, and could be the wild card in this ‘mobile phones battle of the browsers’: Skyfire. It’s built on the same guts as Firefox, as far as I can gather, and it does the clever trick of rendering the web pages, on their servers at their end, and just showing you the result. Which means full support for Flash, Java, and various other web technologies that no other mobile browsers fully support.
Will that give Skyfire the critical advantage? Or will Firefox Mobile blow ‘em all out of the water? Only time will tell…
Want to check out the competition? Get yourself the Sony Ericsson X1, and try out Opera Mobile today!
