Firefox Takes Its First Baby Steps on Android

A Mozilla engineer has posted the first screenshot of the Firefox web browser running on Android. Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukicevic is currently working on porting the mobile version of the Firefox browser to Google’s mobile operating system. The first results, seen in the screenshot above, were posted to Vukicevic’s personal blog Tuesday. This means that, yes, […]

A Mozilla engineer has posted the first screenshot of the Firefox web browser running on Android.

Mozilla's Vladimir Vukicevic is currently working on porting the mobile version of the Firefox browser to Google's mobile operating system. The first results, seen in the screenshot above, were posted to Vukicevic's personal blog Tuesday.

This means that, yes, a full, add-on capable version of Firefox will be making its way to Android phones and tablets in the future. Just a few days ago, Mozilla released a version of Firefox for mobiles running Nokia's Maemo OS.

Vukicevic's screenshot shows Firefox running in an Android emulator (to make debugging easier, he says) but it works fine on regular Android devices, too. His team has "a ways to go" before the first public alpha release -- various input methods like the keyboard and mouse only "sort of work," to say nothing of a touch screen -- but it's cool to see some progress being made.

More from Vlad's post:

You'll note that this is the full Firefox interface, and not the Fennec/Firefox Mobile UI; we're testing with the full interface because it's significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well. Given the interest in Android on netbook and tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these.

See Also:

  1. Review: Google Nexus One