By One of the developers on the Mozilla Firefox team is a guy named Vladimir Vukićević and he has just made a really interesting post on his blog about Firefox and Android. Basically, they’ve got the FULL FIREFOX browser working on Android and although it has some kinks (which he explains) it seems to be working really well.
Why the full Firefox? Because it’s much more complex and complicated to get running on Android… so if they can do THIS version they can do anything. Not a bad approach.
I like some of the things I had to hear about his experience with Android:
- Porting Firefox/Fennec to Android is progressing at a good clip
- Android has been pretty great to work with so far;
- It’s a bit unusual platform for us due to its Java core, but with the NDK we’re able to bridge things together without many problems.
As for the outlook of completion? Nothing to get too excited about but a product is definitely in-the-works and they’re optimistic:
We’re still a ways to go before any kind of usable alpha release, but we’re certainly one step closer. We’ll also be able to accelerate our progress now that we have some of the basic scaffolding in place. I know I’m looking forward to running Fennec on my Droid, and there are tons of Android devices coming out that should be great platforms for Fennec.
Eagerly awaiting!
[Via Giz]
Awesome.
I hope it comes with the nifty Add-Ons that I’ve come to know and love about Mozilla. :D
So addons would be cross compatible?
AWESOME.
Looking good so far. Can’t wait for a usable release so we can all try it out :-)
Wow, the full firefox… does that include video and audio tags in HTML5? If so, who needs to wait for flash ;)
Mozilla just released the first version of its mobile browser, Fennec, today for the Nokia N900. The site says it will be available for other platforms very soon.
Mozilla Firefox Mobile 1.0
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/
Looking good, just hope it works as fast as the built in browser does :)
Can’t wait for this to launch. If there’s ONE thing that sucks about the Android experience, it’s the browser options.
is google not building a mobile version of chrome?? that’s the only thing i use, unless a site doesn’t work which is about 3% of the time…
if they can bring firefox to android then we may be able to see all kinds of other c/c++ apps ported to android
When !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Firefox on google .!!! is like to try to export coconuts to. Hawaii
Oh it’s this early in development… I hope we’ll see a beta next year.
Way to embrace the android platform, Mozilla. Port the desktop version to android instead of creating a version with an interface optimized for touch screens.