Mozilla Firefox Begins Beta Testing Program For iOS
Mozilla Firefox will be available to Apple users soon, as signaled by its recent recruiting of users to be beta testers of the application before it hits the App Store.
The link to the survey that interested testers had to complete now says that the Mozilla is no longer accepting iOS Pre-Release candidates for the iOS version of Mozilla Firefox.
According to TechCrunch, when the survey by Mozilla was active, it requested that users have a version of iOS 8 or higher. The survey also reminded users that the beta build would have bugs and be prone to breaking, hence the reason for testing the software prior to the launch.
Even though Mozilla Firefox was made available for Android in 2011, Gary Kovacs, former Mozilla CEO, refused to create a Firefox application for iOS devices for years because the company wanted to use its own web engine, which Apple did not allow.
“Our web engine is different. … I would love to see far more energy behind iOS. We refuse to make the policy switch.”
In December of 2014, however, Mozilla officially stated that it was working on designing a Firefox experience for iOS.
“At Mozilla, we put our users first and want to provide an independent choice for them on any platform. We are in the early stages of experimenting with something that allows iOS users to be able to choose a Firefox experience. We work in the open at Mozilla and are just starting to experiment with a couple of different concepts, so we’ll update you when we have more to share.”
Current Mozilla CEO Chris Beard was on board to expand to iOS just a few months into his leadership, and so was Firefox release manager Lukas Blakk.
We need to be where our users are so we're going to get Firefox on iOS #mozlandia
— Lukas Blakk (@lsblakk) December 2, 2014
Since the goal is to create an experience close to using the web-based version of Mozilla Firefox, the Firefox application for iOS will essentially be “a user interface on top of WebKit and the Nitro JavaScript engine, instead of using Mozilla’s own technologies under the hood,” TechCrunch said.
Having the browser on an iOS device would offer features that web-based Mozilla Firefox users would benefit from, such as support for Firefox accounts and the ability to sync bookmarks.
The competitive advantage for Mozilla Firefox on iOS could be an offering of more privacy controls as compared to other browsers such as Chrome, which would be attractive to users looking to have more control over access of their private information.
Mozilla could use the advantage when it comes to mobile platforms, considering it only has a 0.58 percent share compared to Chrome’s 30.06 percent and Safari’s 34.49 percent, according to data from NetApplications.
Mozilla Firefox users are not the only ones to be excited about the launch; Mozilla seems pretty enthusiastic as well in their message to users who sign up to receive updates.
“Thanks for your interest in the upcoming iOS version of Firefox. We’re pretty excited about it too!”
Users can sign up to receive information about the release of Mozilla Firefox for iOS here.
[Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images]
