Mozilla Commits To Mobile
By James Quintana Pearce - Wed 10 Oct 2007 02:19 AM PST
Mike Schroepfer of Mozilla has put up a blog post detailing what the organization plan to do in the mobile space, and it’s pretty different from the direction indicated by Doug Turner six months ago. It’s a fairly detailed blog entry, in which he states that Mozilla is starting a serious move into mobile now because handset specs are getting to the point where they won’t have to make a browser from scratch, they’ll be able to use a lot of the existing Firefox code.
The plans: Mozilla will make mobile part of its core platform by adding mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. It will also ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which will be able to run Firefox extensions and allow people to build rich applications via XUL. As part of the process they’ve hired two new people: Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave (NSDQ: OPWV) which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, will head up the platform engineering effort and set up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Brad Lassey has moved from France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) R&D and will focus on Mozilla mobile full time. The full mobile browser is due to ship in due course (no time frame was give beyond “after Firefox 3” and “certainly not before 2008") but Mozilla will continue to invest in Joey and work with partners looking to ship Mozilla browsers.
Posted in: General
