If you’ve been holding your breath for Firefox to come to iOS, you can exhale now. Under Apple’s current policies, there is no way for Firefox to be designed for iOS.
During a panel at the SXSW Interactive festival, Jay Sullivan, vice president of product at Mozilla, came out against Apple’s current policies on 3rd party browsers. Sullivan revealed that Mozilla is not currently active in pursuing an iOS version of its popular Firefox browser. The reasoning behind this is that Mozilla feels it would compromise the vision it has of its browser if it cannot port over its rendering and javascript engines. Apple currently only supports browser that are based on the WebKit engine.
Mozilla previously developed the Firefox Home app for iOS, which synced bookmarks and histories to your iOS device. This was a work around to get Firefox users’ content onto iOS devices. Unfortunately the experience wasn’t intuitive and really only served as a stopgap until Mozilla could find a way to put Firefox on iOS. Unsurprisingly, Mozilla decided to discontinue Firefox Home last year.
Creating a browser ecosystem is crucial and Mozilla is taking a huge risk by not developing a browser for iOS. The company is currently throwing much of its weight behind the Firefox OS, hoping to capture some of the handset market and creating a tempting ecosystem for consumers and developers.
The over all consensus between the panelists at SXSW is that choice benefits consumers. Apple isn’t giving its users many browser choices, which only ends up hurting consumers. Seth Rosenblatt asked whether the audience was suffering due to the lack of browser choice on iOS. Only a few hands were raised.
Source: CNET
