06 May 2008

Porting Mozilla's Firefox onto Symbian OS?!

Well, first of all, to be completely honest with you and to be perfectly clear, I am an Internet Explorer user. As a matter of fact I have been since I started browsing the Internet, and I have found no compelling reason to change.

Actually I am using the using the Avant and Maxton shell (www.avantbrowser.com and www.maxthon.com) that puts the FireFox to shame, incomparable better solutions, give it a try, you’ll not be sorry.

Of course I do have Firefox installed on most of my computers but only using it to check my site recently and to ensure that new section are rendered properly and that’s it, don’t like it, don’t need it and can’t suggest it really!

Even worse, after reading the Harry Li's post on the Forum Nokia Blogs I am afraid it will fail to impress me even on the mobiles although I’ll give a try if they will ever release it.

Harry took some info from the "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" book and realized that Firefox is “30 times It is 30 times larger than the Apache Web Server, 20 times larger than the Java 1.0 JDK/JRE sources, 5 times bigger than he standard Perl distribution, twice as big as the Linux kernel source, and nearly as large as the whole GNOME 2.0 desktop source—even when 150 standard GNOME applications are included."

Sure, the information from the mentioned book is maybe a little outdated, also maybe size can not tell everything about an open source project. But what we could learn is that porting Mozilla platform onto Symbian OS will be a huge project which needs lots of hours, especially for those mobile developers with little Mozilla hacking experiences.

Firefox Mobile in development

I am really curious how the mobile version of the Firefox would stack up to Opera Mini , and especially Skyfire, its cloned and improved version, or to other big players like the great Safari based browser forced by Apple and Nokia and offers the best mobile browsing experience nowadays.

From other hand the desktop version of the Firefox has lot of users and most of them are so called power users and when it comes time to choose a mobile browser they’ll probably choose the portable version of its favorite desktop solution?