Extreme Tech – by Grant Brunner
For Firefox diehards, iOS has always been a bit of a sore spot. Mozilla dabbled on Apple’s platform a few years back with an app dubbed “Firefox Home,” but the company has largely shied away from iOS due to Apple’s restrictions surrounding rendering engines. Now, Mozilla is changing course, and bringing a version of Firefox to iOS running WebKit — Gecko be damned. Can this strategic decision help turn the table in Mozilla’s favor, or is the move to WebKit a nail in Firefox’s coffin?
Earlier this week, Mozilla’s Johnathan Nightingale announced the development of Firefox on iOS to the crowd at Mozlandia in Portland, Oregon. Soon after, a short blog post went up at Mozilla.org confirming the move onto iOS. The company is still in the early days of development of this release, so details remain relatively sparse for the time being. At this point, not even the dev team knows what the final product will look like.
Frankly, this announcement came as a bit of a surprise. Just last year, Mozilla stood strongly against Apple’s hardheaded refusal to allow alternative rendering engines on iOS. Now, Mozilla seems totally willing to play ball in exchange for access to Apple’s massive user base. If I had to guess, this is likely due to the tepid response Firefox OS has seen since launch.
Of course, it’s possible that the WebKit engine may end up serving as little more than a fallback by the time this finished product sees the light of day. Other browsers like Photon and Opera can use the cloud to render web pages, and that seems to successfully skirt around Apple’s strict rules about third-party rendering engines on the iOS device itself. If Mozilla is up for the challenge, a fully-featured Firefox browser could potentially make its way to iOS with Gecko intact. Is that worth the massive overhead and potential technical issues, though? Only time will tell.
If you want to see Firefox on iOS for yourself, you can head over to the official Mozilla GitHub page, and download all of the latest code. You’ll need to compile and sideload the app onto the iPhone yourself, but at least you’ll get a nice window into the development process. Just remember, the developers clearly warn the public not to “get too attached to this code,” because there will almost certainly be huge overhauls before it’s ready for public consumption.
http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/195479-firefox-for-ios-is-coming-but-its-not-what-you-think