Is mobile Firefox going to be too late?
I read Dana's piece about Symbian possibly going open source too late with great interest.
I've wondered the same thing about Firefox Mobile, which debuted on Jan 29. Like Symbian on the proprietary mobile OS front, Mozilla's Firefox has been the leading open source browser for more than six years. Yet it only released its mobile offering, code named Fennec, less than a week ago, and for only one platform: the Nokia Maemo 5 OS.
In the last 15 months, Google's open source Android mobile operating system and included browser -- based on the open source WebKit application framework -- has gained some market share and skyrocketed in popularity. Motorola's Android-based Droid is oft compared to Apple's iPhone and Gartner predicts that Google's mobile OS will be the second leading mobile OS platform by 2012.
So does that mean that the mobile version of Firefox is too late? It's hard to call this early in the game. There are numerous complaints about the current Android 2.1 browser. But certainly it would have been much better if Mozilla jumped into the mobile browser market earlier and grabbed the spotlight away from specialty offerings like Opera Mini.
Mozilla has a version of Fennec under development for Android and an Alpha 3 release for Microsoft Windows Mobile available now. There are some who look forward to running Fennec on Android but based on reports it will be some time before it sees the light of day.
It will be interesting to see how Google's reputation in the open source world evolves. Android is open source, and released under the Apache license, but not all of Google's code is open source. It will also be interesting to gauge customer reaction to Fennec's performance on Nokia devices.
Of course, there's tons of market share to be divided.
Mobile Firefox screenshot