Mozilla: No Firefox for iOS in the Works
Mozilla told attendees at SXSW why there's no Firefox for iOS.
If you're an iPhone user hankering after Firefox on your phone, you're going to be waiting a while. Mozilla this week revealed that it won't be pushing out a version of Firefox for iOS until Apple changes its ways.
CNet cites Mozilla vice president of product, Jay Sullivan, as saying there is no Firefox for iOS in the works. Not only that, but Sullivan told attendees at South by Southwest that the company didn't have any plans to produce such an app because of Apple's strict policies on third-party browsers. According to CNet, the nonprofit doesn't feel it can build the browser it wants to build because it's not allowed to use the same rendering and javascript engines on iOS. Speaking in a statement to PCMag, Sullivan said that the decision was down to constraints with environment and distribution.
Firefox uses the Gecko engine while Apple's Safari uses WebKit. Clearly Mozilla is waiting until it can do things its own way. Unfortunately, anyone waiting for Apple to change its ways to accommodate others, particularly its rivals, might be waiting a long time.
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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nukemaster Well it makes sense. IF you can not use your own rendering engine, you are kind of going to gimp your own program. The only use would be to at least have your bookmarks/history syncedReply -
cryogenic The EU bureaucrats should also target Apple with an investigation if they bothered in Microsoft's case.Reply -
The_Weevil @ cryogenic: current news about the EU fining MS are just the aftermath of a process started a really log time ago, when Windows + IE really DID have kind of a monopoly (At a time before Firefox, long before Chrome; Apple at that time struggling to stay afloat and Linux far away from today's point-and-click distributions like Ubuntu. Yeah, I feel old.)Reply