Mozilla pulls Firefox for Windows Mobile

 

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By Hani Megerisi

Posted on 23 Mar 2010 at 17:32

Mozilla has halted development of Firefox for Windows Mobile, including Windows Phone 7 Series.

Work on the browser was stopped after Microsoft closed off development of native applications for its new mobile OS, requiring developers to work in Silverlight or the XNA Games Studio instead.

"We know that the underlying platform for Windows Phone 7 is Windows CE 6, which is a big step up from the kernel used by Windows Mobile 6.5," writes Stuart Parmenter, mobile team technical lead at Mozilla, on his Pavlov.net blog.

"Windows CE 6 is a platform that we have been developing towards, and already run well on, leaving us well positioned to have an awesome browser on Windows Phone 7."

"[But] given that Microsoft is staking its future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold," he added.

Mozilla will continue to develop Firefox Mobile for Google Android and the Maemo Linux OS used in Nokia's high-end smartphones. Parmenter said some of the development work undertaken on the Windows Mobile version of the browser will be of use on the other platforms.