Alex Kidman17 December 2008, 12:00 PM
Ambitious plans will see Firefox mobile ported to Symbian Smartphones, possibly by as early as April next year.
If you're a smartphone browsing type, one of the more challenging aspects has long been that there's not a whole lot of choice in the mobile browsing arena, with many users sticking with their default browser; if you wanted choice, there was Opera Mobile, and that's about it.
Mozilla has a team responsible for mobile Firefox development,under the product name Fennec. Why Fennec? Well, the Fennec Fox is a smaller member of the fox family, or in other words, a smaller version of Firefox. This is apparently what passes for punnery in the development community. In any case, the plans for development for Linux and Windows Mobile 6 versions of Fennec have long been known, and according to a
blog post from lead Fennec engineer Christian Sejersen, you can now add Symbian-based smartphones to that list.
The plans for Symbian Fennec are ambitious; Sejersen's timeline calls for Fennec to support full browsing by the end of April, although the final release -- sorry, "productisation" of Fennec is still to be determined. It would appear to be a smart move; Sejersen quotes Gartner figures that state that
Symbian smartphones represented 49.8% of sales in Q3 2008, compared to 11.1% for Windows Mobile and 7.2% for Linux.
Fans of Android, Blackberry or iPhones are probably out of luck, though; Sejersen notes that
"There are a few other platforms: iPhone, RIM and Android that have or are gaining market share, where we for technical or licensing reasons can’t be deployed."We're going to go out on a limb here and say that the odds of Apple approving Fennec for the iPhone 3G are about as likely as Steve Jobs not turning up for a Macworld Keynote. Wait... let us think about that simile for a while.