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Mozilla dumping development of Windows Mobile Browser

Mozilla has announced that it is to dump development of a Windows Mobile browser.

The company made it clear that the reason for its decision is due to Microsoft and that it believes it is completely futile to continue with its years-long development of a Firefox browser for Windows 6.5.

The Mobile Team Technical Lead for Mozilla, Stuart Parmenter, has said that the company made every effort to build a browser for 6.5. He added that Mozilla would have liked Microsoft to release a development kit for native Windows 7 apps so that the company could put it to use. In the meantime Mozilla intends to focus on Android and Maemo.

Mozilla has the disadvantage that it is not widely available at present in a mobile-phone friendly format. At the moment, it is only available on two devices – the N810 Internet Tablet and the Nokia N900.

However, the company is working on a version of its search engine for Android phones. Firefox for Mac, mobile and Windows are all created using the same ingredients and once Mozilla can get the Gecko platform operating smoothly on Android, it can then look at porting an Android version of its Firefox browser.