Mozilla chief promises mobile Firefox before 2010

By Christian Ziberg, Wolfgang Gruener

Chicago (IL) - Although several browser vendors have had mobile versions of their products for some time, Mozilla has been strangely absent from this space. We recently reported on a blog post of Mozilla’s “chief lizard wrangler” Mitchell Baker, who stated that the organization wants to have an “effective [Firefox] product in the mobile market”. Mozilla replied to our article and said that the statement in the post should not be interpreted as Mozilla planning to launch a mobile browser in 2010 – in fact, the organization aims to release a browser before that.

In a new blog post, Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker noted that she saw have an effective product in the mobile space”, which may indicate that Mozilla won’t ship a mobile browser by 2010. She added that “that is not the case at all” and that Mozilla “will ship well before then.”

“The intent of this goal was to say: in 2010 when we look at where we are, it should be screamingly obvious that we’ve done this. That means releasing a good product much sooner, seeing good results and acceptance, and seeing those results grow over time,” she wrote.

Obviously, the problem was the interpretation of “effective product.” Mitchell Baker gave us a few more hints on the meaning of an “effective product in the mobile market” in a recent blog post. According to the CLW, an effective product will have a certain mindshare, marketshare, momentum, a reference implementation for the generative Web and ongoing platform issues.

Of course, this brief explanation does not hint to any particular launch date. But here is our guess. Work on certain mobile platforms has just started and we are nearing the end of 2008, which means we may not see the browser this year. And if it is not 2010, then only 2009 is left. We leave it up to you to estimate when in 2009 that might be, but since we haven’t seen alpha, beta or RC version yet, we tend to believe that we are at least half a year away from a product.

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