A first look at Mobile Firefox

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Mozilla

A first look at Mobile Firefox

by Simon Kerbel Jan 25th 2008

Mozilla has just revealed a first look at its new Mobile Firefox interface. Actually, Mozilla has designed two UI's: one for touch screen devices, like most PDA's, smart phones (and the iPhone, of course), and one for non-touch devices, like most cell phones.

The Firefox mobile browser takes some hints from Apple's own mobile Safari browser, with the main Firefox screen reproducing some familiar buttons: back and forward navigation arrows, a bookmarks button, a retractable address bar.

The mobile Firefox UI does include a few new buttons/features: the zoom in and zoom out buttons reside on the bottom toolbar (though we're not sure why they don't use the touch screen itself for zooming in and out). The tabs button gives users a different look than in Safari mobile: when pressed, it displays up to four tab previews on the same screen for quick tab switching.

Firefox mobile browser will likely be integrated with Places (Firefox's new bookmark-like scheme) and the newly introduced Weave.

[via Cybernet.com]

Tags: mobile, mobile firefox, MobileFirefox, safari

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

James said 4:02PM on 1-25-2008

Uhh, I have the suspicion they'll want to talk to the owner of MobileFirefox.com, which appears to be hosting a Mobile Apps-style version (runs from a thumb drive, etc), not a Mobile Phone-style version.

Also, GIMME GIMME GIMME! I need a decent browser for my wife's HTC Hermes.

Tush said 4:08PM on 1-25-2008

Yeah, I'm excited for this. Pocket IE sucks and Opera costs money. Minimo was a good effort, but it is too buggy to use effectively.

AlexL said 11:45PM on 1-25-2008

How do you use the touchscreen for zooming in/zooming out without multitouch?

Dave said 12:00PM on 1-27-2008

Microsoft's new brower uses zoom without multitouch.

You just double tap to zoom in.

Damian said 12:47PM on 1-27-2008

By the looks of it, the idea will be just essentially just having a mobile based interface for Gecko 1.9. So it should have almost the same functionality as Firefox 3 does, and a lot of Firefox 3 features make a lot of sense in the mobile space, would save time on browsing and stuff e.g awesomebar.

As for those concept designs, I think the actual product when it comes to fruition will look a lot better. What I'm interested in, is will Mozilla 2 (which I assume they'll call the rendering engine Gecko 2.0 and its Firefox counterpart will called be Firefox 4) be designed from the ground up to have a mobile version as they are describing here?

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters