Firefox for Mobile, Future Prospects

After the release of the first Mobile browser by Firefox, I decided to take a peek in the Mozilla camp to check out the future plans of their Mobile browser development. And since I am talking about the great Firefox here, I am sure all of you will be interested in knowing the same.

The current release is build for Maemo OS and available to only N900 smartphone owners so we all have a lot of questions in mind about its availability on other platforms. I will try and answer some of the queries here.

Man! I wish I had a Nokia N900. When is Firefox going to release a mobile browser for my regular(non smartphone ) mobile?

Sorry to disappoint you friend, but it seems firefox is only interested in making mobile browsers for smartphones by now. The reason given by them, which I think is fair enough, is that standard mobiles or feature phones are not powerful enough to support a great Firefox experience. So, if this is the case then I don't think standard mobile users will get the "great Firefox experience" anytime soon.

What about me? I have an iPhone, its a smartphone right! When am I going to get the Firefox Mobile Browser?

Ah! bad luck for you too , Firefox has no plans to release a browser for iPhone. It is indeed a smartphone, powerful too, no doubt but the issue is technical here. According to the developers, the OS environment and the distribution is too restrictive.

And I am afraid that there is a similar issue in case of Blackberry too. Because of its Java-based Operating System and inability to build native components, Firefox is not compatible on the Blackberry OS.

For Symbian users, Firefox currently doesn't have any plan to build a browser for Symbian Platform.

Any clue about Android and Windows Mobile?

Both the Android and Windows Mobile users would be happy to know that the Firefox browser for these platforms is under development. Firefox for Android is currently under early testing and development phase. Its alpha release should be out soon .

Windows Mobile users would know by now that Firefox has released an alpha3 version for them. It might be a little buggy and lack full functionality but if you still want to try it out use your native browser to navigate to its site and install it. Although there are some contraints here, the OS requirement of Firefox is Windows Mobile 6.0 or above and the system should have at least 128 Mb RAM and 32 Mb storage.