The folks at Mozilla posted last night to a company blog about the new plans they have to make a mobile browser a first-class consideration, a core platform, when working on the forthcoming Mozilla2. The new mobile browser is probably still a year away. I sure wish we didn’t have to wait too long, but hopefully it will be worth it.
The company said it will “ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.”
Two new additions to the Mozilla mobile team were also announced, Christian Sejersen and Brad Lassey, both mobile industry heavyweights. Sejersen will head a new R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This sounds like great news to me. I spend more than an hour a day on a mobile browser; I feel dirty using IE mobile but can’t stand the crawling fidelity and frequent freezing of Opera Mini. I will be very excited to bring extensions into a new mobile browser from Mozilla, the first will be a del.icio.us toolbar.
For more analysis of this and other mobile news, check out coverage from mobile industry experts Russell Beattie and JkOnTheRun.
