14 DAY TRIAL // A while ago, Mozilla announced plans to come to the market with a Firefox for Android browser, and now we learn that its goals are a little clearer than before. Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile, stated recently that the company was working on providing Android users with a beta version of Firefox before the end of the ongoing year, something that should make a lot of them rejoice.
We already had the chance to take a look at the early development stages of Firefox for Android, as the browser was shown displaying its first pages not too long ago, and we were told that a public alpha flavor of the browser should arrive within the following few months, but now our expectations grew higher. With all the goodies promised to be included in the application, a beta version available for Google's Android OS before the end of the year sounds very appealing, that's for sure.
In case there are some of you who might not know what Firefox mobile is set to bring along, we should mention that Mozilla announced that it would have the same Mozilla's XUL and Web standards like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS programming languages as the browser available for desktop PCs. It is based on the Gecko platform and Mozilla is working on making it run smoothly on Android.
In addition to the good news delivered for Android users, Sullivan had some good news for users of Nokia's Maemo platform, as well as for those who will adopt the MeeGo OS. The company will continue the development of the browser for these mobile clients, even if the Maemo OS is currently available only on the Nokia N900 and the N810 Internet Tablet, Sullivan stated, according to a recent article on Cnet.
However, it seems that the owners of Windows Mobile-based devices are not so fortunate. Mozilla announced not too long ago that it would halt the development of its browser for Microsoft's mobile operating system. The fourth alpha flavor of Firefox arrived on the platform not too long ago, but things will remain here for a while, and won't move forward for Windows Phone 7 either, at least not until Microsoft will deliver a native development kit (NDK).