Mozilla wakes up, pouring huge engineering effort into Firefox Mobile

Chances are you use Firefox, have a few extensions installed and if you’re really hardcore you probably have a Firefox shirt somewhere in your closet. The browser that swept the internet by storm is coming to your mobile. While no time table was given, here are a few things Mike Schroepfer (Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla) had to say:

• Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.
• We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.

Too little too late? We will have to see. Something Mike pointed out is that by 2008 the processors in our smartphones will be close to an order of magnitude faster than what we currently have. Webkit is winning now because it is so light weight and flexible, will Mozilla be able to make a comeback?

[Via: Ajaxian]