Mozilla yesterday again rejected the concept of crafting a version of Firefox for the iPhone, saying that it's instead focusing its iOS efforts about the Firefox Home sync software.
Firefox Residence, which was admitted into the iPhone's App Store by Apple in July, is not a full-fledged browser, but rather a spin-off with the bookmark and tab synchronization technology Mozilla is baking into Firefox 4.
The application gives customers access to their browser bookmarks and history, as well as towards the open tabs from their most recent Firefox sessions. The iPhone software also includes technologies from Firefox's address bar to let users search for previously-visited pages using keywords or characters in either the URL or the page title.
Synchronization is one-way only -- from Firefox on the desktop to the iPhone, but not the reverse.
In a blog post that outlined Mozilla's future plans for Firefox House, the firm reiterated that it won't try to turn the app into a fully-functional browser. "People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox House, but you'll find technical and logistical restrictions that make it challenging, if not impossible, to construct the full Firefox browser for that iPhone," mentioned Ragavan Srinivasan, a product manager at Mozilla.
Although Apple clarified its App Retailer admission policies earlier this month, competing browsers remain off limits to outside developers like Mozilla unless they're willing to completely rewrite their code.
"Apps that browse the Web should use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit JavaScript," Apple's revised guidelines read.
But Firefox is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, not on WebKit, as are Apple's Safari on the desktop and iPhone, too as Google's Chrome on the desktop. Mozilla also relies on its own JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey.
The thumbs-down for Firefox about the iPhone was no surprise: As long ago as February 2009, the company's then-CEO, John Lilly, mentioned that Mozilla would not develop a browser for Apple's smartphone.
As opposed to dump resources down a black hole, Mozilla yesterday explained it would push on with Firefox Property for the BlackBerry and Symbian platforms -- Symbian powers Nokia's phones. Srinivasan also said the team may write an iPad-specific edition in the sync application.
According to Srinivasan, the business plans to beef up the current Firefox Home for your iPhone with additions such as password synchronization, and possibly new connections to social networking services like Twitter and Facebook that would let users share links or other comments.
Mozilla's built-for-mobile browser, called Fennec, will run on Google's Android operating system, putting the organization on that fast-growing platform. Fennec, which was recently renumbered from version 2 to model four to keep it in step with Firefox to the desktop, went public as an alpha preview final month. Mozilla froze development in the first Fennec 4 beta earlier this month.
The business has no plans to create a model of Firefox Residence for Android.
Firefox Home 1.02 was released final week, and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Shop.
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