MWC 2010: Firefox Mobile for Android Soon

MWC 2010: Firefox Mobile for Android Soon

Techtree News Staff, Feb 18, 2010 1749 hrs IST

The browser, known as Fennec, will be out by year-end

It was not long ago that Nokia's Maemo got a taste of Mobile Firefox, the mobile browser from Mozilla. Apparently, that's not the end of the story. Mozilla is readying a version of Firefox Mobile for Android devices. Not only that, it plans to release it before the year-end. If you are an Android user, you just got one more reason to smile!

So, Fennec, as this browser is known, will be making its first appearance sometime this year. While we all had an idea that this was in the pipeline, no one knew when this would be made available. Why the delay you may wonder? Without going too technical, let us simplify that bit for you.

Android, in its earlier form, supported apps that were developed using Java. Fennec is based on C/C++ and the development had to wait till Google added support for those programming languages back in June 2009. So, in the near future, browsers, apart from the decent default browser, on Android devices would be vying for a share of the pie.

Skyfire, for example, too is in the fray and by year-end, we'd have a nice line-up of Android browsers ready to be tried and tested.