Those of you longing for a native Firefox app that can run on your iPhone or iPad may have a bit of a wait. Speaking to a panel at SXSW in Austin, Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan there’s no way the Foundation is going to take another shot at building a browser for iOS until Apple decides to change its development policies.
Alternative browsers have always been second-class citizens on iOS. Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to utilize all of Safari’s muscle. Instead, they’re limited to running the embedded iOS “web viewer,” which Apple itself has admitted “does not take advantage of Safari”s web performance optimizations.” Apple also doesn’t allow alternative browser engines (like Gecko), so there’s really only one option for companies that want to offer up a Safari competitor to the iOS legions. That generally means slapping a custom UI, synchronization features, skins, and maybe some cloud-powered functionality like the ability to transcode Flash video on the fly.
Mozilla, says Sullivan, isn’t interested in heading down that road again.
It tried before with Firefox Home, which was killed off back in August of 2012. The app provided users with access to their synced Firefox data on iOS, but it was never developed into what looked like a full-featured browser. Really, it functioned more like the iOS mail app. And with the embedded web viewer running the show, Firefox Home was never all that impressive in terms of performance.
Sullivan said the main roadblock is that Mozilla can’t ship its own rendering and JavaScript engines in an iOS version of Firefox. Unless Apple experiences a change of heart — or someone launches a successful campaign against the company and its browser policies are ruled as anti-competitive practice — the Foundation is never going to be able to do that.
Mozilla is willing to pass on shipping Firefox to the iOS legions right now because it’s hoping that the “next billion” web users will be surfing on an inexpensive Firefox OS phone.
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