Mozilla Labs CEO Reveals Plans to Launch Browser App for iPhone

The Safari browser on your iPhone could soon see some tough competition. In a recent interview to Om Malik from GigaOm, the CEO of Mozilla Labs, John Lilly has revealed that his company is working on a Mozilla application for the iPhone. The announcement has been a teaser with not much information revealed about the actual product. 

While details regarding the Mozilla app for iPhone is not known, Om Malik speculates the availability of the Weave functionality in the iPhone app. If true, this could let users upload their personal browser preferences like their bookmarks, history and other customizations in a cloud that could be accessed from a Firefox browser on any other device. With increasing number of users accessing Internet from multiple devices, Weave could not only make importing your preferences easy, but this could also push people into making Firefox their default browser on all these different devices. 

However, a potential problem with this functionality is that it directly competes with the dot.mac service and Apple is known to reject iPhone apps that tend to replicate the core functionality of the iPhone. Nevertheless, a Mozilla application without the Weave functionality is still a very attractive product. While the Safari browser on the iPhone is one of the best mobile browsers around, competition is always healthy. We are still not sure about the launch date, though Lilly has revealed that it shall happen "in the next few weeks".

This news is interesting and caught us by surprise as we weren't expecting any browser iPhone apps. If you have a been a regular reader here at iPhone Hacks, you will remember that late last year Stephenson von Tetzchner, co-founder and CEO of Opera had given the following reason for halting development of their iPhone app while there were quite a few speculations that Opera Mini had got rejected from the App Store.

"Development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted. We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license"

Let's hope the Mozilla application is not merely an iPhone application, which is based on Safari's version of WebKit like we have seen already.

Are you excited at the prospect of using Firefox on your iPhone? Do you think Apple will approve Mozilla's iPhone app? Please do tell us in the comments.

[via GigaOm]

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