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Mozilla negotiating with carriers – Firefox Mobile set to launch by year-end

By: , IntoMobile
Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 PM

FireFox Mobile from Mozilla set for 2008It sucks that Mozilla has to work with wireless carriers before it can roll out its Firefox Mobile browser – Stefan would agree. But, that doesn’t mean that Mozilla will be held up in releasing their Firefox Mobile browser. The mobile web-browser is set for release by year’s end 2008.Unfortunately (for wireless operators), bringing a more desktop-like browsing experience could push mobile operators closer to becoming a “dumb-pipe” whereby their services are viewed as simply providing the means to access the web. Forget “web-services” and portals, the future of mobile operators will be to serve up binary bits to our smartphones so that we can go along our merry web-surfing way.”I think that some carriers will basically fight this kicking and screaming, and some will embrace it and move ahead quickly,” said Christian Sejersen, head of Mozilla’s mobile engineering group in Copenhagen.  Hopefully, more carriers will embrace their new fate, and bank on higher data revenues from opening up their “walled gardens.”There’s a lot of room for improvement in the mobile browser space. Incumbents like Apple, Nokia, and Opera might have a head start, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for new players. “Somebody needs to come in from the side and give everybody a kick,” Sejersen said. “I think the iPhone has done it … but I still think there’s more than can be done to make [mobile browsing] easier.”Bring on Firefox Mobile. We’ll be waiting…[Via: PCWorld]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • Peng

    How is it a supposedly professional tech site still doesn’t know how Firefox is spelled? The source you got the story from spells it right, and the graphic you use has the proper spelling of it. Is your editor asleep at the switch when he reads your copy? Get the little details right and I’ll see about paying more attention to your site and overlooking the fact that your sidebar is twice as long as your article. When I was checking the sidebar out I was shocked it wasn’t filled with ads, but when you can’t spell something as simple as Firefox right I don’t know if I want to see what else you get wrong.

  • jouni

    Creating a new mobile browser is not as easy as people would think. It’s a question of in-device connectivity.

    You can create a web/wap/imode browser, connect to internet and view most of the pages – but usually you need more. You want to download and upload files, use multimedia codecs, launch browser from external apps, embed browser into other apps, launch other apps from browser, support as many URI schemes as possible (http, https, file, tel, telnet, mailto, fax, wtai, ftp, sms), use connectivity (WLAN, BT, IrDA, WCDMA, GPRS, CSD), support DRM, MMC, microphone, camera etc. jne. usw. osv. stb…

    Opera has greate browser, Mozilla is using same WebKit as Nokia. Neither one will ever be able to integrate as deeply into the phone as Nokia in-house team.

    If you want to browser websites, you can choose. If you want to use browser in a phone, there’s no competition.