Mozilla will introduce Firefox for Apple's iPhone "soon," according to a company announcement of an open marketing position.
As the senior mobile marketing manager, the candidate will "lead marketing for Firefox on both Android and iOS," the listing stated, adding that "a new Firefox for iOS application [will be] arriving soon."
Mozilla An early rendition of Firefox on iOS features a "tab tray" that shows open sites in a vertical orientation. (Image: Mozilla.)
Other jobs available at Mozilla also called out Firefox on iOS, including one for a senior product manager and software engineer.
Mozilla, which had previously staunchly declined to create a version of its iconic browser for iOS, changed its tune last December, when a company manager said that the open-source developer would "get Firefox on iOS."
Although
Mozilla confirmed that it was working on Firefox for iOS, at the time
it gave no hint of a timeline. "We are in the early stages of
experimenting with something that allows iOS users to be able to choose a
Firefox-like experience," Mozilla said in a Dec. 2 blog.
The
phrase "Firefox-like experience" was crucial: Apple allows only those
browsers into the App Store that are built atop its own rendering and
JavaScript engines, WebKit and Nitro, which power Safari. Mozilla relies
on its own technologies for both. Firefox on iOS, then, will be a user
interface (UI) layer atop WebKit and Nitro.
Mozilla's Github repository for iOS Firefox confirmed that.
The
reasons for Mozilla's renewed interest in iOS likely stemmed from
Firefox's decline in browser user share. Over the last 12 months,
Firefox has shed 31% of its desktop user share by metrics vendors' Net
Applications count, and now has less than half the share of Google's
Chrome.
Mozilla has put its shoulder behind other mobile
initiatives. But Firefox OS, an open-source mobile operating system
based on the browser, has not yet gained significant traction and its
Firefox browser for Android hasn't moved the needle. According to Net
Applications, Firefox's usage share on mobile was just 0.7% last month,
or about one sixty-sixth that of Safari.
Apple's iOS, while far
behind Android in shipments, has long had a reputation as the operating
system that generates the largest share of mobile browsing. Mozilla
would like to tap into that ecosystem if it could.
According to Techcrunch,
which last week also reported that Mozilla would soon debut Firefox for
the iPhone, Mozilla will launch a marketing campaign next month to get
more people using its browser. The publication also said that Li Gong,
Mozilla's president, and Rick Fant, who heads its mobile group, are
leaving the firm.
