some mozilla comments (Score 2, Informative)

The post that's referenced in the article is available on mozilla's newsgroup and was Mitchell just asking for feedback on our 2010 goals. We're still in the process of fleshing out those goals and we're trying to figure out how mobile plays a role in them.

Our mobile involvement is something that's going to take a while to get spun up, but it's not something that will take as long as people think it will take here.

First of all, Mozilla is the only browser solution that has a fully open source browser that's flexible and is multi-platform. Our code works on x86, x86_64, ARM, ppc, etc. We have the entire browser infrastructure in place as well - history, bookmarks, UI rendering, full networking stack - everything. And our engine is completely competitive in terms of our ability to execute on mobile platforms.

That being said it's important to understand that WebKit is not a browser. It's an HTML rendering part - an important part but everything else that goes around the browser is also huge and complex and hard to build. And everyone who has embedded WebKit has either had to borrow someone else's or build their own. So everyone has to re-invest to get the entire browser infrastructure that we already include. WebKit people have generally invested earlier, but we'll get there faster with a better solution that's tested against the real web.

Chrome is interesting too. It's essentially a big huge win32 app. It uses wininet for a lot of its networking and while the JavaScript engine is portable it's not as portable as Mozilla's new JS engine. Chrome has some neat stuff, but it's going to be a little while before it's up and running on the mac and linux. Chrome is basically built like Netscape 4.x was - native front ends for every platform. Porting pain.

Anyway, it's going to be a fun couple of years and I'm happy that Mozilla will be taking the dive into Mobile. We'll be able to bring a lot of the Firefox experience and community along with us.

We're looking forward to the day when you can walk into a store and ask for the phone with Firefox on it.