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Mozilla confirms Firefox for iOS to be released in the future

For over four years, Mozilla has expressed that it has no interest in porting its Firefox web browser to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Under the leadership of new chief executive Chris Beard, however, that mindset appears to have changed, as TechCrunch reports that Mozilla has recognized a need to release Firefox for iOS in the future.

With rapidly declining market share in the web browser race since Google Chrome was released in late 2008, Mozilla appears set on capturing the hundreds of millions of iOS users with a Mobile Safari alternative. “We need to be where our users are,” Firefox release manager Lukas Blakk tweeted this afternoon. “So we’re going to get Firefox on iOS.”

Mozilla has routinely expressed disinterest in porting Firefox to the iPhone and iPad because of Apple’s strict requirement that third-party web browsers be based on its own WebKit web engine. Mozilla has its own sophisticated web and rendering engines that it utilizes for Firefox, and felt that its web browser experience would be inadequate on iOS devices.

Apple recently made changes to WebKit on iOS 8 that allow for all web browsers to have the same level of performance as Mobile Safari, although it remains unclear how Mozilla will bring Firefox to iOS. It is likely that the company will be forced to use at least some of Apple’s technologies when developing its web browser.

Additionally, iPhone and iPad users are still unable to set third-party web browsers as default. For this reason, it is hard for existing Mobile Safari competitors like Chrome and Opera to make much of a dent on Apple’s built-in web browser, but Firefox could attract users with features such as seamless bookmark and password syncing.

The report does not outline any specific timeframe for a Firefox for iOS release date.

Mozilla did not provide comment.

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Comments

  1. crichton007 - 9 years ago

    If this is anything like their version of Firefox for Android you can expect this to suck on iOS too.

    I used to be a huge fan of Firefox (back when it was a beta product that ran as a standalone app that didn’t require an installer on Windows) but their browser is such a bloated mess that it has gone from a great alternative browser to something I only use when I need a backup browser.

    • Well, I used Firefox like 7 years ago, now I’m Safari only but to be fair to Firefox, almost everything sucks on Android so..

      • thejuanald - 9 years ago

        Get a load of this guy.

    • Urtho (@MilamberUrtho) - 9 years ago

      If you mean superior to Chrome, then I hope it is just like the Android version. Personally I find Safari annoying and hard to use, but then I have been using Firefox or Opera or Chrome for a long time now. Extensibility is a must on desktop, and Firefox’s extensions work better in most cases than Chrome’s for me.

      Firefox is my primary, Chrome is the backup if I want to see something that is only in Flash. Safari is only opened if I think my browser settings for lockdown are messing up a page to be unusable that I need to use. Otherwise I would prefer if Safari was not on my Mac.

      • thejuanald - 9 years ago

        I’ve had nothing but trouble with Firefox on my Mac and on my Note 3. It’s a clunky interface and incredibly bloated. On the Mac, Chrome has all the extensions I need and is much more minimalist in it’s approach and it’s UI. There’s nothing I hate more than a gaudy UI.

      • No trouble on my Mac for years … and I am using Aurora/DevEdition and Nightly as my main browsers with three different profiles partly setup for testing and from time to time I have the beta version open as well.
        ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#beta ; https://nightly.mozilla.org/ )

        Mozilla is for me still the best regardig openness, etc: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ and that’s what want to support in and which creates convidence in the products for me.

        Using Opera as my backup, though. Only open Safari, Chrome or IE for some browser specific code examples and to check out other new browser specific features which are relevant for me.

  2. scumbolt2014 - 9 years ago

    Those fucking crybabies at Mozilla can shove their browser up their asses.

  3. Mark Anthony Hall - 9 years ago

    Too little too late. I was a religious Firefox user until 2010 when the iPad came out. I slowly started to use Safari to keep things in sync and in 2012 when Safari suddenly got a lot quicker and Firefox started looking old on the Mac, I stopped using it.

    Firefox will always have a place in my heart for being the only alternative to IE worth a damn back when Opera charged money and Netscape was a joke (it was Firebird back then).

    Ahh, Firefox and Thunderbird… Almost makes me miss Windows XP!

  4. On the desktop they could be losing less market share if they had kept their act together.

    In the company I work, we have our front desks running Firefox and using a custom plugin we built ourselves to talk to printers and stuff. We are still using FF 3.6.x, because Mozilla keeps changing their plugin API in every single version and it only gets worse after each version.

    We’re currently evaluating other solutions that mostly involve Google Chrome.

    So, yes, by experience FF is getting the fate it deserves, but now I understand it was the management’s hand that pushed them there.

  5. sc0rch1ng - 9 years ago

    Hope it will happen soon. Lack of Firefox in iOS is the only reason I do not use it as my main browser.
    Every modern browser must be presented on all modern platforms and all it’s versions must be synchronised together.

  6. standardpull - 9 years ago

    You guys are mostly nuts. Firefox is an awesome browser – great performance and privacy controls that can’t be beat. Too hard to use? Really you must be incredibly stupid if you come to that conclusion.

    But Firefox has political issues. Firefox promoted the excellent Do Not Track feature, and added robust and easy-to-use privacy controls. The advertising industry hates this – they need to build a huge dossier on all consumers – the more data they can collect, the more money they can make. And who better attack Firefox than the Billionaire king of the Advertising and Data Collection industry: Google.

    Yeah, Chrome is a technically excellent browser. But all of its features are designed to encourage trafficking in user information. Did you surf the web today? Did you log into Gmail too? If you use Chrome, chances are excellent that Google knows every website that YOU visited, and but will only share that with its “partners” – which is basically anyone it wants. Try to turn down the privacy tracking? Good luck with that – Chrome actually explicitly warns users AGAINST it. In my world, we call that FUD.

  7. hudsonvalleyguy313 - 9 years ago

    FIREFOX IS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!! I USE IT FOR MY LAPTOP AND MY DROID PHONE
    AND TO BE FAIR…
    I HAVE NEVER USED CRUMMY EXPLORER EVER AGAIN!!!!!!
    I BEEN USING #FIREFOX FOR YEARS….

  8. Jay (@BlueJayL) - 9 years ago

    If Firefox for iOS supports AdBlock Plus and other extensions, this is GREAT news.

  9. Gonna need a lot more than 2GB of ram anyway.