Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Mobile at Mozilla, makers of the Firefox internet browser, has said that the the company is aiming to have a release candidate version of their first mobile browser out next week and that a final version is due to hit the market in the next few weeks. Firefox Mobile will initially only be support on Nokia’s Maemo 5 powered N900, but the goal is to bring the browser to Windows Mobile and Android in the future. Firefox for Mobile will have many features such as geolocation support, and in 2010 the browser will also gain:
- Support for multitouch displays, enabling a more blinged out user interface and shutting up the people who point to the iPhone’s web browser and say “I can pinch, you can’t, therefore you fail.”
- Support for haptic feedback, which is pretty crazy if you think about it. Why would you, as a web developer, want to trigger a vibration?
- The ability to activate the camera.
- Support for “Electrolysis“, which is nothing more than Mozilla’s attempt to catch up to Google’s Chrome browser that splits every website into a different process.
- Support for “JetPack“, Mozilla’s new HTML, CSS and JavaScript based extension system.
- Support for WebGL, see video below.
- Built in support for “Weave“, Mozilla’s sync service that stores your passwords, cookies and bookmarks in the cloud.
Jay predicts that in 3 years 80% of all mobile applications will be web based. I completely agree with him and can not wait for developers to stop having to question which platform they should develop for first, second and first.
[Via: C|Net]