While Mozilla has famously stayed away from entering the Apple's ecosystem, the non-profit appears to be re-thinking the matter, as there might be a new Firefox browser for iOS, if a couple of tweets by company employees are any indication.
A new tweet by Mozilla Firefox's Release Manager Lukas Blakk indicates that the firm, under new chief executive Chris Beard, is planning to bring out an iOS version of the Firefox browser soon. "We need to be where our users are so we're going to get Firefox on iOS #mozlandia," stated the tweet.
Another tweet from Matthew Ruttley, Manager of Data Science at Mozilla, also stated "Firefox for iOS!! Let's do this!!! #mozlandia #awesome #mozilla #teamNightingale." Both tweets were posted on December 2 during an internal Mozilla event.
Mozilla famously never released an iOS browser citing Apple's unreasonable policies with which the third-party browsers had to be made using Apple's own WebKit engine. Firefox has its own web rendering engine, and Mozilla felt using WebKit would have provided a compromised experience to iOS users. However, the firm now seems ready to make the sacrifice. For now, it is unclear how exactly will Mozilla bring Firefox to iOS devices.
As TechCrunch notes, Mozilla launched its Firefox Home and Firefox Sync client apps for iOS back in June 2010, letting iPhone users gain secure access to their Firefox browser bookmarks and open saved Firefox tabs on their iPhone handsets. However, the sync client app in August 2012 was removed from App Store.
Mozilla on Tuesday launched its Firefox version 34 (specifically 34.0.5) for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android (34.0) platforms. The browser gains a number of new features in its updated version.
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