Mozilla: Forget about Firefox on iPhone

Mozilla yesterday again rejected the idea of crafting a version of Firefox for the iPhone, saying that it is instead focusing its iOS efforts on the Firefox Home sync software.

Firefox Home, which was admitted into the iPhone's App Store by Apple in July, is not a full-fledged browser, but rather a spin-off of the bookmark and tab synchronization technology Mozilla is baking into Firefox 4.

The application gives users access to their browser bookmarks and history, as well as to the open tabs from their most recent Firefox sessions. The iPhone application also includes technology from Firefox's address bar to let users search for previously-visited pages using keywords or characters in either the URL or the page title.

Synchronization is one-way only -- from Firefox on the desktop to the iPhone, but not the reverse.

In a blog post that outlined Mozilla's future plans for Firefox Home, the company reiterated that it won't try to turn the app into a fully-functional browser. "People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox Home, but there are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone," said Ragavan Srinivasan, a product manager at Mozilla.

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