Mozilla: No Plans for Full Firefox Browser on iPhone

In a blog post published today, Mozilla effectively announced that it has no plans to bring a full-fledged standalone browser to the iPhone, preferring instead to focus on its Firefox Home application designed to integrate the browsing experience among desktop and mobile environments.

No Firefox Browser for the iPhone

We are working to bring as much of your Firefox experience as possible to Firefox Home. People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox Home, but there are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone. We are focused on building Firefox Home as a rich, cloud-based application and making it a valuable product that people will continue to love and use.

Based on user interest, Mozilla is exploring whether to tackle and iPad-specific version of Firefox Home, although that would offer limited functionality similar to the iPhone version of the application.

Apple's iPhone and other portable iOS devices of course ship with versions of Apple's own Safari browser optimized for the respective devices, and for the most part there has been little interest from major players in creating third-party browser applications for the platform. One exception, however, is Opera, which launched its Opera Mini browser earlier this year, offering features such as server-side compression to speed page loading.