If you use the internet on your phone, then a story from Engadget Mobile, this morning, may get you as excited as it made me. It’s well known that Mozilla are working on a version of Firefox specifically for mobile phones. It’s fair to say this has a lot of people excited (myself included), as it promises to bring a much nicer, faster and easier browsing experience to your phone.
If the new concept that was shown online last night is anything to go by, this could well be the browser that really makes the internet on your phone something you’ll crave.
It starts with what they call an ‘infinite 2D plane’. Imagine, basically, a big black sheet, and on that, you have your pages, shown in tabs. Just like your get on the desktop version of Firefox, but on mobile phones, they’re shown as graphic representations of whatever page you’re looking at. And you’ve probably noticed the massive great big plus button. That’s the bit that lets you add a new tab. Oh, and the cool bits when you zoom into a page is having hidden controls that you can pan the page across to see, meaning you never get cut off web pages… oh, and when u flick through a page, it keeps scrolling till it runs out of steam, slows down, and stops, just like on the iPhone.
Which looks fabulous!
Actually, you know what, it’s kind of hard to describe what I’m seeing here, without getting stupidly techy, so I’ll just go by gut and say how cool it is. I’m already getting a sense of how easy it’s going to be to scroll round pages, and flick pages about with just your fingertips. And god, do I want to try it out!
Tell you what, I’ll just show you the video, so you can see for yourselves how lip-lickingly fabulous it looks.
How cool is that…
You can probably tell what browser this is going to go up against (well, aside from Opera, its main rival): Safari. They’re after getting the feel of the browser on the iPhone 3G, but with all the good stuff you get from Firefox, and the speed of something like Opera Mini (which is what I use and is, frankly, the best browser I’ve ever seen for mobile phones).
If they pull it off right, even if it looks NOTHING like the concept in that video, I can say categorically, that it WILL be awesome. I know at least one guy who says that Firefox Mobile will be the thing that gets him using the internet on his phone (big shout out to my mate down in Surrey), and I can’t help but wonder how many people feel the same way…
Could Firefox Mobile be the thing that finally gets everyone using the internet on their mobile phones…?
Are you drooling with excitement at the prospect of Firefox Mobile? Do you use Safari on the iPhone and think it’ll be interesting to see the two browsers fight it out? Leave us a comment and have your say!
