Mobile browser battles
The desktop has long been the battle scene for fierce competition between internet browser makers. But 2009 is likely to see the mobile browser wars taking centre stage.
Part of the reason that the mobile browser space has not been a heated battle space over the past years is that there hasn’t really been a lot of competition and what browsers did exist were built-to-task. Apple ships its own browser as does Nokia and other popular mobile makes. The idea that users need a third party browser on their phone – just as they do on their desktop – has only recently started to take root in consumers’ minds.
Which has meant that when it comes to installable browsers for mobile devices and cellphones, the dominant player has long been Opera with its range of browsers. Opera can probably quite legitimately claim, as it does, to produce the world’s most popular mobile browser but that could change as developers like Mozilla enter the space with competitors.
The biggest threat is likely to come from Firefox’s smaller sibling, Fennec. Midway through 2008 Firefox released an alpha version of Fennec and although final releases are only expected in late 2009 or early 2010, Fennec’s entrance is likely to shake up the market.
Extensions
Fennec is a stripped-down browser built with mobile touch screens in mind. Although it is a little late coming to the market, Fennec has something that no-one else does: An enormous Firefox extensions database that in all reality could be ported over to Fennec fairly quickly. With the array of extensions potentially available to it, Fennec stands more than a fighting chance of making headway in the market, despite most others having a head-start.
Right now though, Fennec is only available for certain Nokia devices, but it is expected to be released for other platforms in the near future. Already it is available in emulator form for most operating systems.
And when it is more broadly available it can reliably be expected that hundreds of the existing extensions available for Firefox will be ported to Fennec. That is a challenge that Opera, Apple and others are going to find hard to match.
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