Android Will Have To Wait A While For Mozilla’s Fennec Browser

by Chris Moor

It seems that Mozilla’s recently unveiled mobile browser Fennec, won’t be making it’s way to the Android platform anytime soon.

Last week Mozilla released an ‘alpha’ version of their mobile web browser Fennec. Fennec is a slimmed down version of the popular Firefox browser and is designed purely for the mobile market.

Fennec currently only operates on the Nokia N810 Internet tablet, but by early 2009 it is believed the browser will be ready to run on consmer phones.

However due to limitations in how applications are distributed on the Android Market, Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan believes it may be a while before we see Fennec available for the Android platform.

Mozilla’s Sullivan says that Fennec can’t run on Android right now because the Android Marketplace, where phone software can be downloaded, only accepts programs written in Java. If Android were supportive of applications that could run directly on the operating system without needing to be written in Java, Sullivan says, “then it’s interesting for us. We’ll have to see which direction Google goes with that.”

[via NBCNews.com]

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Categorized as Android News

Comments

http://www.chrisbrunner.com/ Chris Brunner

Why would this stop them from making the product available for download, independent of the Android Market app?
Jon Reeve

Basically because it’s not really about what the Android Market app allows, it’s about what the phone allows – the phone won’t let you install regular apps on the underlying system, just Android byte-code apps that run on top of Android. This is a security thing. Though of course for those people who have managed to get root on their devices it is possible to install all sorts on the underlying system, but then of course making those things available *through* Android would still be tricky to say the least.