Mozilla to Stop Development on Firefox Mobile for Windows Phone 7 & Windows Mobile

Tweet

According to a blog post by Stuart Parmenter, Mobile Team Technical Lead for Mozilla, Mozilla has made the decision to halt development of Firefox Mobile for both Windows Mobile and the upcoming Windows Phone 7. Mozilla has previously shown an interest in Microsoft’s mobile platform as Firefox Mobile for Windows Mobile has been under development for over a year with the product currently in the pre-release stage. With the announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series at MWC 2010 and Microsoft’s resulting shift away from Windows Mobile, the future of this branch of Firefox Mobile has been uncertain.

While Mozilla has been pondering the future of its support for Microsoft’s mobile operating systems, Mozilla has forged ahead with development of its Maemo version of Firefox Mobile, removing the beta tag from the browser and releasing it as full, finished product at the end of January. Mozilla also confirmed that  it is moving forward with the development of an Android version of its full-featured mobile browser, a build that is expected to debut at the end of 2010. Much of the interest in developing an Android version of Firefox was kindled when Google released the Native Development Kit for Android back in September 2009.

A Native Development Kit allows programmers to write their applications in native code, such as C and C ++, instead of compiled code. Native code often confers a benefit to application developers by allowing them to access and reuse a large repository of existing code and, in some cases, improves the speed and performance of an application. It is this lack of native code support in the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform that has reportedly convinced Mozilla to drop support for this up and coming mobile OS. Until Microsoft opens up its platform to native development, Firefox Mobile will focus on the Maemo and Android version of its mobile browser .

This bad news also extends to the current Windows Mobile version of Firefox Mobile. Rather than continuing to pour money and development time into this product, Mozilla has decided to cancel the project and abandon the current work. This decision stems from Microsoft’s position on its current Windows Mobile operating system which will continue to exist and launch on new handsets in 2010 but is expected to soon be replaced by Windows Phone 7.