Firefox Home is Important
A few days ago Mozilla announced that they submitted Firefox Home to the App Store. Firefox Home is a web browser for the iPhone. This would have been huge news had it been the first third party browser submitted to the App Store. But Opera stole that thunder a few months ago when they submitted (and got accepted) the Opera Mini Browser.
I think this move may be more important than the Opera one though. Firefox Home is embedding Safari into their app the same way Tweetie, Tumblr and many other apps do. What makes this different from Opera Mini is that instead of building an entire browser (rendering engine + UI + features) they are using Safari’s rendering engine (Webkit) and are just building their own UI and features on top. A large point worth repeating is this - Mozilla is using Webkit.
For a few years now, many developers have been arguing that Microsoft and Mozilla should throw out their rendering engines (Trident and Gecko) and go with the open source Webkit. That argument has grown louder as Webkit has gained more momentum in the mobile space and in Chrome. If all the browsers used Webkit, it would make the lives of every web developer a lot easier. They would no longer have to make tiny changes in their code to support all 3 browser engines. Users are not choosing browsers based on rendering engines anyway. They are choosing them based on the UI and features surrounding those engines (extensions, themes, etc).
Firefox Home is the first time Mozilla or Microsoft has shipped a product based on Webkit. Sure, Mozilla’s hand was somewhat forced here, but if they truly wanted to ship it with Gecko they could have (as Opera has proven). They decided to instead spend their energy making the features surrounding Webkit better. For that reason, I think this move was more significant than most people realize. Whether it carries over to the desktop, we’ll just have to wait and see. My guess is that if Firefox 4 continues to lose users to Chrome, they may just make that move. As far as Microsoft, I wouldn’t hold my breath. They seem a little too full of pride to make the switch.
