For Firefox diehards, iOS has always been a bit of a sore spot. Mozilla
dabbled on Apple’s platform a few years back with an app dubbed “Firefox Home,”
but the company has largely shied away from iOS due to Apple’s restrictions
surrounding rendering engines. Now, Mozilla is changing course, and bringing a
version of Firefox to iOS running WebKit — Gecko be damned. Can this strategic
decision help turn the table in Mozilla’s favor, or is the move to WebKit a
nail in Firefox’s coffin?
Earlier this week, Mozilla’s Johnathan Nightingale announced the development
of Firefox on iOS to the crowd at Mozlandia in Portland, Oregon. Soon after, a short
blog post went up at Mozilla.org confirming the move onto iOS. The company
is still in the early days of development of this release, so details remain
relatively sparse for the time being. At this point, not even the dev team
knows what the final product will look like.
Frankly, this announcement came as a bit of a surprise. Just last year,
Mozilla stood strongly against Apple’s hardheaded refusal to allow alternative
rendering engines on iOS. Now, Mozilla seems totally willing to play ball in
exchange for access to Apple’s massive user base. If I had to guess, this is
likely due to the tepid response Firefox OS has seen since launch.
Of course, it’s possible that the WebKit engine may end up serving as little
more than a fallback by the time this finished product sees the light of day.
Other browsers like Photon and Opera can use the cloud to render web pages, and
that seems to successfully skirt around Apple’s strict rules about third-party
rendering engines on the iOS device itself. If Mozilla is up for the challenge,
a fully-featured Firefox browser could potentially make its way to iOS with
Gecko intact. Is that worth the massive overhead and potential technical
issues, though? Only time will tell.
If you want to see Firefox on iOS for yourself, you can head over to the official
Mozilla GitHub page, and download all of the latest code. You’ll need to
compile and sideload the app onto the iPhone yourself, but at least you’ll
get a nice window into the development process. Just remember, the developers
clearly warn the public not to “get too attached to this code,” because there
will almost certainly be huge overhauls before it’s ready for public
consumption.
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