Opera made some news yesterday with the announcement that their Opera Mini browser had been approved by Apple for inclusion in the iPhone AppStore.
I’ve asked Mozilla in the past if they had plans to develop Firefox Mobile (aka Fennec) for the iPhone and I’ve been told that it wasn’t going to happen as it went against Apple’s rules. Which is why at first I thought the Opera Mini news was a bit surprising. As it turns out though, according to Mozilla at least, Opera Mini isn’t exactly a browser in the same sense that Firefox is.
“I believe that the difference is that Opera Mini interprets all of the JS on the server side, not
on the client, thus not running afoul of the SDK terms of use which
prohibits interpreters,” Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner wrote in a mailing list posting.
Back in January, I spoke with Jay Sullivan,
vice president of mobile at Mozilla specifically about the iPhone and he seemed pretty clear that Firefox Mobile wouldn’t be headed to that platform.
