In a video presentation published over the weekend, Mozilla demonstrated a prototype of its experimental browser for Apple’s iOS platform. The prototype, called Junior, is still at an early stage of development.
The restrictions that Apple imposes on the iOS developer ecosystem prevent Mozilla from bringing its distinctive Gecko HTML rendering engine to the platform, so iOS users won’t be getting a native port of Firefox like the one that Mozilla distributes for Android.
But Mozilla still wants to have a presence on the popular devices, and it plans to bring other parts of its technology ecosystem (such as its synchronization and identity services) to the iPad, even if it's without Gecko. Mozilla has already exposed aspects of a synchronization service on the iPhone with its Firefox Home application, which serves as a standalone client. A Mozilla browser for the iPad would likely incorporate similar functionality.
Like other third-party browsers for the iPad, Junior will be built on top of the WebKit HTML rendering engine that Apple makes available to application developers. As such, the only thing that will differentiate it from other iPad browsers will be the user interface and the Mozilla service integration.
The prototype is largely implemented with Appcelerator’s Titanium framework, which allows developers to create native iOS applications with JavaScript. Although Titanium has helped accelerate the initial prototyping stage, Junior’s developers say that the framework's limitations have posed difficulties and that the browser will likely be reimplemented in Objective-C before the final version appears.
While building the prototype, Mozilla decided to reassess some of its assumptions about designing a browser interface for tablets. The prototype has a very simple full-screen user interface without conventional tabs or a navigation toolbar. Users switch between websites by using a separate interface that combines the concepts of tabs and history.
The results don't conform with the standard Firefox design that Mozilla introduced earlier this year to unify the browser’s appearance across Android, Metro, and the new "Boot to Gecko" project, and it's unclear if the Junior design will come to those other environments. Some of the ideas exhibited in Junior’s design are intriguing, but it’s hard to get a feel for how well the user interface works in practice without hands-on testing.
Unfortunately, the Junior prototype can’t be widely distributed for testing purposes. Mozilla typically makes its prototypes available to the public, but the restrictions on iOS application distribution make it impractical to share a development build. As such, it’s unlikely that users will get much hands-on time with Junior until it appears in the iOS App Store. For more details about Junior, the video presentation is online at the Air Mozilla website.
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