The long wait is over! Mozilla foundation hints their plans to ‘rock’ the mobile platforms with the Mobile version of the hottest of all web browsers, the Firefox! Mozilla’s entry to the mobile market is definilly late with IE, Opera and lots of other opesource and closed source browsers around the web. But considering Firefox’s ’secure and free’ label it’s never late.

So what exactly is Mozilla is having in the pipeline for Frefox Mobile? Let me quote from mozillazine itself:
* Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.

* We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.

* Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:

** Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

** Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.

Why Now?

1. Lots of Firefox variants like minimo are getting lots of buzz.
2.  Release of powerful hardware like iPhone and Nokia N95. PDA screens are getting bigger day by day.
3. Penetraton of Web 2.0 web applications to the mobile segment.
4. Finding mobile market as  a n untouched niche for online  ads ( eg. Google Adsnes for mobile) .
5. And ofcourse competetions from players like Opera.

No estmated dates or available platforms are decided yet. Hmm.. I’m glad to wait!