{"id":5919,"date":"2008-11-10T10:25:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-10T08:25:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-11-10T10:25:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-10T08:25:00","slug":"firefox-turns-4-targets-mobile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/5919-firefox-turns-4-targets-mobile.html","title":{"rendered":"Firefox turns 4, targets mobile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four years ago on November 9, Mozilla announced Firefox, a new open source browser built around the old Netscape code. Today the Firefox browser accounts for 20% of the global browser market and is one of the most successful open source projects to date. <\/p>\n

Unlike the old Netscape browser, Firefox was stripped of all the excess options and promised to be lean and mean. It introduced tabbed browsing and extensions, optional tools that anyone could write that added functionality to the core browser, and in doing so Firefox changed forever the way users thought of their browser. <\/p>\n

It is a strategy that will also position Mozilla very well for its new assault on the mobile browser market which is began with the release of an alpha version of Fennec<\/a> late last month.<\/p>\n

Fennec is a stripped-down Firefox browser that is built with mobile touch screens in mind. The Fennec interface is simple and clean with an address bar across the top of the screen and the rest of the space is dedicated to the browser. The menu system is largely hidden from users until they need it. <\/p>\n

Like Firefox, Fennec is lightweight and streamlined so there are very few "extras". Instead, the Fennec team is going to allow extensions to do the additional work just like Firefox does. And to this end the Fennec team have already announced the first ported Fennec extension as well as the Mozilla add-ons team adding their support to Fennec so that users can search for add Fennec compatible extensions from within the browser.

The challenge<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although Fennec is very late in coming to the market – Opera and Apple already have strong products out – 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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Firefox discussion<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open source browser turns four, begins assault on mobile browser market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}