First Mobile Firefox enters home stretch

Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence.

"Our goal is to have a release candidate next week," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile. "If things go smoothly, we'll have a (final) version out in the next few weeks," with the debut planned for this year, he added.

Mozilla has been a leader in advancing the Web state of the art. But when it comes to the mobile phones, where the power of a new generation of hardware has transformed browsers from primitive afterthoughts to useful tools, Firefox has been missing in action.

Instead, an open-source project called WebKit powers the browser on the higher-end mobile phones du jour--Apple's iPhone, the Palm Pre, and Motorola's Droid and other models running Google's Android operating system, with BlackBerry headed that direction, too.

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