Mozilla says it's not planning to build a browser for iOS

Mozilla has come out in the open against Apple's policies towards third-party browsers in iOS. Speaking at an SXSW session, Jay Sullivan, vice president of product at Mozilla said that the company is not working on a new browser for iOS and does not have any plans to do so. The development was reported by CNET.

Sullivan mentioned that the limitations imposed by Apple is an impediment to the company's plans of making the browser that it actually wants to. It's worth noting that Apple requires third-party browsers to use the built-in UIWebView for rendering. It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine for its own browser, Safari, while developers cannot use their own rendering and javascript engines in their iOS browser apps, giving Safari a big edge in terms of performance. In addition to these limitations, Apple does not allow users to set a third-party browser as their default browser app.

Mozilla had pulled its Firefox Home app from the App Store in September 2012 and had said that it intended to focus its resources on other projects. It had made the source code available on GitHub, though. The app was not a browser and just enabled Firefox users to access to their desktop history, open tabs and bookmarks, and open them on their iOS devices.

It's also interesting to note that Google had made available the Chrome browser on iOS, last year, though it has to abide by the limitations imposed by Apple. Opera also offers its Opera Mini browser on the App Store, which renders webpages on its own servers. However, Opera is all set to unveil a new mobile browser which would be based on WebKit, for iOS.

We don't think the move will affect Apple as users are not likely to give up a mobile platform because of the absence of their favourite browser, but it would surely not go in favour of Firefox which is losing market share to Google's Chrome.