People ask us all the time about what Mozilla’s going to do about the mobile web, and I’m very excited to announce that we plan to rock it. … Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices. – Mike Schroepfer on Schreps’s Blog

Now those are some words that are very good to see.

I’m a huge fan of Firefox. Can happily say I almost never use IE, and now I don’t use Pocket IE very often either thanks to the iPhone. But … if Mozilla can make ‘Firefox Mobile’ (or whatever it ends up being called) half as good as FF on the desktop, I’d say that would make it roughly 100 times better than PIE.

Mozilla has added new staff to work on this mobile version. They have not yet decided which platforms it will run on initially, and it’s not expected to come out before the end of the year – but hey, that’s not far off now.

This blog post at Schrep’s Blog has lots of good background on why now is the right time for this move (mobile devices gaining power in terms of CPU and memory, as just one example). My favorite reason is:

The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear. If you weren’t sure about this before you should be after the launch of the iPhone.

Amen to that. I know I’m sure of it. Once you’ve had Safari (on the iPhone), you’ll never go back – but a mobile version of Firefox sure would make things a lot more interesting, and almost certainly better, for mobile browsing.

Via: Mashable

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2. FireFox Mobile in the Works
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5. FireFox for Mobile: You Lucky So and So!