Partners Give Thumbs Up To Mozilla's Mobile Firefox Plan

Schroepfer, for its part, said the new mobile version of Firefox for mobile devices will be a robust version of the browser that is already being used by 100 million users. It will run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow third parties to build rich applications via XUL, he said.

"The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear," said Schroepfer. "If you weren't sure about this before you should be after the launch of the iPhone."

"There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility," asserted Scrhoepfer. "There is still plenty of room for innovation."

Scrhoepfer said the new Firefox mobile platform effort effectively puts an end to the "Minimo" (Mini-Mozilla) open source project which resulted in a version of Mozilla for Windows mobile devices, including Hewlett Packard iPaq. He called the Minimo effort "an experiment in mapping the desktop browser experience to a specific mobile context" with no plan to develop that project further.

Scrhoepfer said Mozilla has not yet targeted what mobile platforms the Firefox mobile browser will work on. But the company has already moved to expand its small team of mobile contributors.

Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave, a Redwood City Calif. software maker which has shipped over one billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla on Oct. 9. Sejersen will be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up an R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark, said Scrhoepfer

In addition, Brad Lassey, who's been an active contributor to the Mozilla open source mobile efforts, just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D.

"A large portion of the world accesses the Internet from mobile devices, and this will become increasingly true over time (mobile devices outsell computers 20-1)," said Scrhoepfer. "Each Firefox install is an individual choice by a person to download something that didn't ship by default on their computer. Why not offer that option for mobile devices?"