Mozilla is a stubborn company. They’ve been supporting Android for well over a year now, but they’ve been developing their app using their own XUL engine instead of using Android’s native user interface elements. What the hell does that mean in plain English? Mozilla put a wrapper around Firefox so that they’d have to do less work to get their application to run on multiple platforms. This wrapper, called XUL, caused Firefox to be resource heavy and more importantly it degraded performance to the point where you’d have to be a moron to use their application instead of the default Android browser. Last October we filed a report that said Mozilla recognized that they needed to transition away from XUL for the Android version of Firefox. Today, seven months later, Firefox 14 Beta is available in the Google Play store, and it’s the first version of the browser that doesn’t actually suck.
Great news, right? Not really. Three months ago Google released Chrome for Android. It only runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich devices, which is a bit of a bummer, but boy does it beat the pants off anything else currently available for Google’s mobile OS. Chrome for Android also talks with Chrome for your desktop, enabling things like tab and bookmark sync, which are features that were pioneered by Mozilla, but hey, everyone knows that companies like to steal the best ideas out in the market and roll them into their own products.
Forgetting about Firefox for a second, Mozilla has a more ambitious project called Boot to Gecko. Similar to how Google has Chrome OS, which is an OS that boots straight into a browser, Mozilla wants to do the same thing for mobile phones. It’s not an original idea, Palm tried to do it with webOS, but maybe Mozilla will have more success since they’ve got such a cult following?
Watch this space.