Mozilla Shows Off 'Junior' Browser for iPad

Mozilla last week showed off a browser for the iPad, dubbed Junior.

Junior is now a WebKit-based, full-screen browser that Mozilla said will be far superior to the built-in Safari browser Apple includes on its iOS devices.

"If you look at Safari on the iPad, it's a pretty miserable experience, I think," Alex Limi, a product designer at Firefox, said during a recent presentation to co-workers. "It feels like it's the one app where they took the desktop version, pulled out the UI, and slapped it into the iPad."

As a result, Mozilla's product design strategy team set out to build a better browser for the iPad. What they came up with is Junior, which "gives you a magazine-like feel," to Web browsing, said Mozilla designer Trond Werner Hansen.

In portrait mode, Junior will have two buttons on the screen at the thumb level: a backwards arrow button on the left that serves as the back button; and a plus button on the right that takes you to a menu of browsing options.

That menu includes about 20 icons for favorite or recently visited sites, like CNN, Netflix, or Amazon. Those website icons have been dubbed "containers" - click them to view recently viewed pages within the sites. Full views of those sites are also available atop the containers in a scrollable format.

:story: PC Magazine