Firefox on the iPhone? Mozilla submits Firefox Home to Apple
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 20:49If you’ve been one of the many clamoring to see Firefox running on an iPhone, you may get your chance–of sorts.
Back in late May, Mozilla announced that it would be creating an
iPhone version of its
Firefox browser. On Wednesday, Mozilla submitted its Firefox Home iPhone app to Apple for testing–and, it hopes, for approval.
The free Firefox Home relies on Firefox Sync, a cloud-based syncing technology that promises to securely sync your desktop bookmarks, history, and open tabs across Firefox browsers on desktops, mobile phones, and tablets.
On the coding end, Firefox Home is based on WebKit, the same technology that powers the default
Safari browser. Thanks to that, there’s a good chance that Apple won’t reject the app as a competing browser software, as the company has (in)famously done with other full HTML browser attempts in the past. In addition, though Firefox Home will let you view your recent sites directly from the app via a WebKit viewer, the Web pages will also open in the Safari browser.
Apart from delivering Web pages, Firefox Home will also share links via e-mail.
It could take Apple days, weeks, or months to approve–or possibly reject–the app. We’ll keep you posted with what happens next.
