Mozilla is working on reducing the power consumption of Firefox on the mobile devices. Power consumption is one of the reasons why the Browser is not popular among mobile phone users as it drains out their phone’s battery quite quickly.
Tablets and smartphones are the hottest computing market and Mozilla is attempting to keep itself relevant for the mobile market. Firefox is the second most popular browser on the personal computer space but it is a different ball game altogether on the mobile devices front.
“If you have a powerful device, Firefox performance is in many ways pretty good. But UI [user interface] responsiveness and memory usage seem to be in pretty bad shape,” Mozilla programmer Dave Mandelin said. “So we need to get better measurements and start improving performance in those areas, today.”
Mobile devices today usually come pre-installed with browsers such as Safari on iOS. Since Mozilla is not part of any of the operating systems, it has become difficult for the company to sustain itself in the mobile browser market. Earlier, Mozilla had plans to appear on both Maemo and Windows Mobile but its plans came unstuck due to various reasons.
Any browser which doesn’t use the webkit engine is now allowed on Apple’s iOS, so Firefox is effectively barred from the iOS platform, therefore Android remains the only plausible hope for Mozilla. Mozilla has to start from the scratch and convince the users to install Firefox on their devices.
“Smartphones and tablets are where the next billion people will expect their personalised experience to be available to them anytime, anywhere,” said Mozilla in its vision statement issued recently.
Adding, it said: “To significantly affect Internet life in the future, we will have to deliver value on major OSes, whether we are allowed to ship our own browser engine or not.”