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Mozilla: No Plans for Full Firefox Browser on iPhone

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Apr 12, 2001
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In a blog post published today, Mozilla effectively announced that it has no plans to bring a full-fledged standalone browser to the iPhone, preferring instead to focus on its Firefox Home application designed to integrate the browsing experience among desktop and mobile environments.
No Firefox Browser for the iPhone

We are working to bring as much of your Firefox experience as possible to Firefox Home. People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox Home, but there are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone. We are focused on building Firefox Home as a rich, cloud-based application and making it a valuable product that people will continue to love and use.
Click to expand...
Based on user interest, Mozilla is exploring whether to tackle and iPad-specific version of Firefox Home, although that would offer limited functionality similar to the iPhone version of the application.

Apple's iPhone and other portable iOS devices of course ship with versions of Apple's own Safari browser optimized for the respective devices, and for the most part there has been little interest from major players in creating third-party browser applications for the platform. One exception, however, is Opera, which launched its Opera Mini browser earlier this year, offering features such as server-side compression to speed page loading.

Article Link: Mozilla: No Plans for Full Firefox Browser on iPhone
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/28/mozilla-no-plans-for-full-firefox-browser-on-iphone/
Allow change of default browser

If apple would have allowed Opera to be the default phone browser I would be using it now. But having every external link open in Safari makes 3rd party browsers almost useless in my opinion.
 
The reason for this is opera is the only one that renders the webpage server-side, so it doesn't actually have an engine in-app, while other browsers have their own engine. Apple doesn't let you use anything other than the webkit engine, so it is impossible at this time to completely implement any other browser, except for those browsers that use webkit, like chrome.
 
chasemay said:
If apple would have allowed Opera to be the default phone browser I would be using it now. But having every external link open in Safari makes 3rd party browsers almost useless in my opinion.
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That's what BrowserChanger plugin from cydia is for
Also no need for ipad version of firefox home jus run it on iPad using FullForce plugin
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; Orange San Francisco Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17)

Would a mass of people use Fennec on iOS? Safari already provides one of the best mobile browsers out there.
 
ChazUK said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; Orange San Francisco Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17)

Would a mass of people use Fennec on iOS? Safari already provides one of the best mobile browsers our there.
Click to expand...

Well personally, even in alpha stage, i can see that Fennec will be a browser that can best the stock android one.

I already know that the stock android browser is faster than mobile safari.. soo maybe Fennec will be the fastest yet?
 
dgree03 said:
Well personally, even in alpha stage, i can see that Fennec will be a browser that can best the stock android one.

I already know that the stock android browser is faster than mobile safari.. soo maybe Fennec will be the fastest yet?
Click to expand...

You cant really compare an android browser with an iOS browser. For one, the processing architecture is slightly different. On top of that it all boils down to the specs of the device. I bet if you ran the Android browser on the original G1 phone it's performance would be terrible compared to the iPhone (well...I can TELL you it IS terrible -- I had one and it was slower than a 1st gen iPhone).

Its simply not possible to say 'androids X app is faster than Apple's Y app' - Different devices, different specs, different OS.
 
skip the iPhone

But we need browser choices on the iPad.

The iPhone is a phone is a smartphone. It has limited real estate for certain things, though in reality, its use of iOS makes it nearly the same as the iPad for functionality.

The iPad is an internet device. If it wants to break into enterprise for real, there will need to be some changes and additional browser choices. Certain database apps are written with specific browser codings for javascript. The one I use currently is for fundraising and development, but it is adapted from a larger program that runs in many industries. Currently, and only recently, does it include Firefox in addition to IE 6 or higher. ONLY those two browsers work. Of course, neither of these are on the iPad.

I'm working both ends of the candle, hawking at Apple to open up to Firefox and working on the company "xxxx" to open their product to Safari.

So far, neither has budged. And I'm bummed. It would mean HUGE sales for Apple to move into this realm and HUGE expansion of use for "xxxx". But they can't see the forest for the trees.
 
BayouMan said:
But we need browser choices on the iPad.

The iPhone is a phone is a smartphone. It has limited real estate for certain things, though in reality, its use of iOS makes it nearly the same as the iPad for functionality.

The iPad is an internet device. If it wants to break into enterprise for real, there will need to be some changes and additional browser choices. Certain database apps are written with specific browser codings for javascript. The one I use currently is for fundraising and development, but it is adapted from a larger program that runs in many industries. Currently, and only recently, does it include Firefox in addition to IE 6 or higher. ONLY those two browsers work. Of course, neither of these are on the iPad.

I'm working both ends of the candle, hawking at Apple to open up to Firefox and working on the company "xxxx" to open their product to Safari.

So far, neither has budged. And I'm bummed. It would mean HUGE sales for Apple to move into this realm and HUGE expansion of use for "xxxx". But they can't see the forest for the trees.
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You should do neither. What you , and others, should do is harp on both to code to work on standards!!!
 
Already can use Firefox on the iPhone

You can already use Firefox on your iPhone or iPad using one of several VNC or RDP apps, or using an app such as CloudBrowse.

Remote viewing of browser rendering is how Opera Mini works as well.

Same thing.
 
rmwebs said:
You cant really compare an android browser with an iOS browser. For one, the processing architecture is slightly different. On top of that it all boils down to the specs of the device. I bet if you ran the Android browser on the original G1 phone it's performance would be terrible compared to the iPhone (well...I can TELL you it IS terrible -- I had one and it was slower than a 1st gen iPhone).

Its simply not possible to say 'androids X app is faster than Apple's Y app' - Different devices, different specs, different OS.
Click to expand...

Sorry. That don't hold water. The end result is what matters. That is what the end user sees. If it's faster then it's faster.

"Ask any racer. Any real racer. It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."
 
sinsin07 said:
Sorry. That don't hold water. The end result is what matters. That is what the end user sees. If it's faster then it's faster.

"Ask any racer. Any real racer. It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."
Click to expand...

Im not convinced browsing *is* faster on Android. But i haven't held a new high end Android phone vs. an iPhone 4 and done tests. I can tell you an iPhone 3GS blows away a Motorola Droid in browsing though, just because the Droid is so choppy when doing any kind of scrolling/zooming/etc. To me that's a bigger issue than being a bit slower in Javascript benchmarks (but then I guess it also depends on what kinds of pages you visit the most often).

I'm pretty sure the two will remain pretty close to one another in pure browsing speed anyway- as they seem to leapfrog one another every 6 months on the desktop versions of their browsers.
 
All I want is an ad blocker for safari or firefox to come to iOS so I can use Ad Blocker Plus. I am tired of pages taking twice as long to load because of ads.
 
Personally I don't really like Firefox much anymore anyway. It feels like it's gotten really clunky and kinda slow over the past few years. I prefer Chrome to be honest, but there's one extension that I need that isn't as good on Chrome yet which keeps me from switching.
 
That's a shame, but not a surprise. I'm a webkit guy myself, but it would be nice to see some of the innovation Firefox could bring. Fennec is shaping up to be an interesting thing.
 
Well, can’t say I’ve been looking for FF on the iPhone or on any other device for that matter. Most anything that goes wrong on a computer can eventually be traced to FF. The few times I’ve tried FF, it was always plagued with glitches and bugs. I‘ve had very good luck with Safari and up until recently I’ve never been interested with running multiple browsers. However, I have progressively been running Chrome along with Safari. The combo works quite well, especially when one or other is hanging.
 
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