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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Hmm I don't know. I love Mozilla on a regular computer but I'm not sure if a few preferences would make me want to have both browsers installed on my iPhone since you can't remove Safari. It is only a minor issue to have to delete my web history, which is something I'm sure would be an available preference to have set on Mozilla. Also I don't see a Mozilla price other than free so could we possibly see ads?? What other mobile benefits could come from this?
This will be awesome if it still supports extensions and I don't see why it wouldn't since XULRunner is pretty core to Firefox.
It will never get past Apple.
I'd be happy just to have weave and mobileme sync bookmarks.
I can't believe we still can't get browsers to sync a short text list. Rocket science, it's not.
Mozilla must launch the FireFox app using cydia ,So it can use all the power of the browser without any restrictions from apple
When will flash be supported dammit~! Its been years now~!
I'm only interesting if it has FLASH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT"S THE MATTER WITH APPLE???????????? GET THE FLASHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
It will never be allowed. Apple is waiting to dissaprove this app. It will never see the light of day.
That's exactly what I thought when I read the title. And I like what Jorge said about it being released in Cydia.
Flash is allowed today as long as its self contained inside an app. see mlb player.
Flash will never be allowed in the browser because this would allow for a marketplace for apps outside of itunes. Apple is never,never,never going to allow a legit 3'rd party marketplace.
FIREFOX ON CYDIA! … that is less of daydream than on the app store … with full flash support … this would be heaven on earth !
I don't think a regular company (like Mozilla) would want to deal with all the problems releasing their app to the hacking community. Doesn't seem like good publicity.
If Apple rejects this, it will officially become Microsoft. IE, anyone?