Looks like there will be no iPhone Firefox in the foreseeable future. In a recent interview with Wired Mozilla CEO John Lilly took a chance to give Apple a jab about their limiting iPhone SDK & App Store. Looks like if Firefox is going to ever make it’s way to the iPhone it will require an unofficial 3rd party native application ported by some brilliant iPhone hacker.
Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone?
Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it’s because of technical issues — they don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That’s a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We’re focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there’s not that many of them. We’re part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you’ll see more in the next year or so.
Would there really be much point in having Firefox on the iPhone? I’m guessing that’s what a lot of people are saying after reading what’s been written on this website, and to be honest, I’d have to say that Firefox wouldn’t be any faster than what the iPhone has already to browse (well, from what I think anyway, I could and probably am completely wrong).
Yes, ofcourse there are a lot of Firefox Supporters, including myself, but I just wouldn’t see the point of porting it onto the iPhone, unless it was within iPhone Linux, to make the phone really unique and personalised to what the person likes.
I’m not a “brilliant iPhone hacker” lol
But I’m working on porting firefox to the iPhone in my spare time , I hope apple has the guts to deploy it when it’s ready
Let’s face it , Safari is gay , and it crashes a lot
I’m adding some of chrome features that i liked too
If by not “brilliant” you mean someone who uses gay to mean crappy, then I completely agree with you.
Still, if you got the skills to port it, then go for it!
I think the major advantage would be browser competition spurring innovation.
This isn’t huge news but we have a ton of Firefox users on this site.
Little interesting tidbit: Last month 40% of our traffic was Firefox beating IE at 35% and Safari at 20%.
35% IE?!?! I can’t believe that many people are still using it.
So bad, firefox really is the best browser in the universe !
I prefer IE over FF
i love safari but i want firefox on the iphone so that way there would be competition and advancement i mean apple has no reason to upgrade safari at all because there is no point, everyone will be using it
Tell me about it! Everytime you’re trying to surf a regular website with Safari in WAP HTML &
there’s “too much” Java on the page, it crashes. Apple just wants all shares of the big future videocontent pie for itself! Competing browsers could supposedly circumvent copyguards & encryptions…they’ll have to come around sooner rather than later, though. Where’s the hihat hack in the meantime?
the biggest advantage i could see is plug in support wouldn’t you love to have the ability to use flash content besides youtube
indeed FF would be a great feature fo the iphone/ipod touch. simplifying its mobile demands to reach apples requirements is next to near impossible do to the fact that mozilla would end up wanting a pay cut from it all and apple isnt down for that. safari is a web browser with limited access points for “hackers” if you will unlike IE and FF because microsoft and linux has always been in compitition for best OS that the open access points are the least of their worriea at this point and apple realizes this and wants better over all so safari was created. you can try to mod mozilla for iphone but it wont happen. i do wish you luck to those who are trying tho.