Mobile Firefox coming to Symbian, Mozilla developer says

Mozilla will release its mobile Firefox browser, also known as Fennec, on the Symbian OS, according to a blog post by Christian Sejersen, Mozilla's director of mobile engineering.

"In Q3 2008 Symbian had 49.8 percent of the total smartphone sales (and 57 percent in Q2) according to Gartner compared to 11.1 percent for Windows Mobile and 7.2 percent for Linux," he said. "So in order for Mozilla to be relevant in the smartphone space we need to have a presence on the Symbian platform."

Sejersen outlined a development plan for Fennec going into 2009. Fennec compiling and linking should be complete by the end of January; basic browsing should be possible by the end of February; full browsing by the end of April and initial testing and product development at some later date.  

So while the news may be joyous for Nokia handset users, where Symbian is heavily entrenched, there are some caveats to the rollout on other handset platforms. In the same blog post, Sejersen said, "There are a few other platforms: iPhone, RIM and Android that have or are gaining market share, where we for technical or licensing reasons can't be deployed."

For more:
- see this IntoMobile post
- see this Tech Radar post

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