11 December 2008

Fennec For Symbian Kicked Off Today!
Mozilla Just Released The Symbian S60 Project!

Two months ago, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, has rolled out an "alpha" version of Fennec, the long awaited mobile version of the Firefox their very popular desktop browser but without word about support for other mobile platforms.

This early release is only available for Nokia’s Linux based Maemo platform and it basically lets programmers play with the interface, catch bugs, and write add-on features as well.

At the moment Mozilla is focused on the Linux and Windows Mobile devices but it seems that they finally realized the power of the worlds leading mobile platform and they just kicked off an official project which should result with porting the Mobile version of the Firefox browser to Symbian S60 devices!!!

Here is the quoted info from Christian Sejersen's blog about the project that should get the development kick-started and invite everybody who is interested in seeing Fennec (Mobile Firefox) on Symbian to get involved!

Today we (Mozilla) are focusing our efforts in mobile on Linux and Windows Mobile devices. In Q3 2008 Symbian had 49.8% of the total smartphone sales (and 57% in Q2) according to Gartner compared to 11.1% for Windows Mobile and 7.2% for Linux. There are a few other platforms: iPhone, RIM and Android that have or are gaining market share, where we for technical or licensing reasons can’t be deployed.

So in order for Mozilla to be relevant in the smartphone space we need to have a presence on the Symbian platform. We have worked with Symbian to understand and scope the size of the project and Symbian are supporting this with engineers to start working on this project so far. At the same time, several Symbian houses are interested in contributing work.

The current high-level plan (that we will revise as we move forward) is split into 5 phases:

1. Fennec compiling and linking Planned completion date:
   end of January
2. Basic/limited browsing possible Planned completion date:
   end of February
3. Full browsing Planned completion date:
   end of April
4. Fennec ready for initial testing Planned completion date:
   TBD
5. Bug fixing and productisation of Fennec Planned completion date: TBD

Want to get involved? Take a look at the wiki or join us on irc on #mobile for general mobile discussions or #symbian for Symbian specific discussions.