Comments on: Mozilla to Weave a Flashy iPhone Presence?

By: Ruben

Ruben — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:53:03 +0000

Nope. Those are all frontends to Apple’s own Webkit rendering engine. In layman’s terms, Safari is still running the show, with a different user interface on top. If a website is broken on Safari, it will be broken on all of those.

Apple has not allowed ana third pardy full browser app on the iPhone so far, as far as I know, and there’s little chance of that happening.

By: Hari Seldon

Hari Seldon — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:17:11 +0000

There currently several browsers in the App Store, see for yourself

http://ax.search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/search?entity=software&media=all&page=1&restrict=true&startIndex=0&term=web+browser

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:33:25 +0000

I can’t see Apple ever letting another browser on the iPhone. I think this will be a Weave app for syncing bookmarks over to the iPhone from the Firefox world. They already let Xmarks do that for Safari.

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:04:48 +0000

Completely understand what Apple’s stance is on this. Then again, their stance on applications was that web “apps” were good enough and we all know that they changed that thought — which changed the mobile application market as we know it. ;)

In any case, you raise a valid point about the hardware challenges of putting Flash on the iPhone. However, it’s a similar hardware package to Palm’s Pre, which we do know is getting Flash. From a hardware perspective, I’d say the latest iPhone can handle it.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:55:04 +0000

“And I don’t want to overlook something that Fennec offers over mobile Safari — native support for Flash. Lilly said that we’ll be surprised by what’s coming and I think Flash on a third-party iPhone browser would qualify as such.”

Well, that’s one thing that certainly won’t happen.

That would require the Flash runtime on the iPhone with all the problems that would bring in terms of instability and battery life. Apple have *already* ruled that out. In fact, they’ve specifically said no third-party runtimes at all.

Goodness knows what this application is, but if it’s supposed to “surprise” people, then the likelihood is it isn’t anything that’s occurred to you.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:33:43 +0000

Oh, I meant to say that I could see the potential for some sort of weave-based solution coming to the iPhone. Technically you don’t need Firefox to take advantage of Weave Sync technologies.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:30:02 +0000

I have difficulty seeing Apple approving a Mozilla based application at this point. Firefox and Flash are precisely the types of competition that they had in mind when they wrote in their apps restrictions that they would not allow applications which allowed for scripting. Firefox/Fennec becomes an uncontrolled apps engine in their eyes as developers could run applications on top of it like a platform.

By: kaffeboy

kaffeboy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:03:31 +0000

If this happens the meaning of happiness will be complete…

By: steve

steve — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:54:43 +0000

I have tried Fenenc several times during its long period of development, and Weave, but both left me a little empty in their operation.
Last time I tried Fennec on my winmo was about one month back and the operation was less than stellar.
I don’t use Weave anymore as it proved inconsistent.
I truly wish the Mozilla teams all the best with this, I would dearly love to see them take a bigger share of this market and I would convert back at the drop of a hat provided they both work as they should.
For the iPhone; I heard somewhere about a week ago that there was a Firefox browser in the offing. I haven’t heard anything about Weave for quite some time.

By: Lincoln Stoll

Lincoln Stoll — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:35:17 +0000

Actually, MobileMe does sync bookmarks OTA, and has since it launched.