Mozilla is set to finish development of its mobile Firefox browser Fennec for Symbian-based phones by the middle of next year.
In a blog post, Christian Sejersen, Mozilla's director of mobile engineering, said the open source firm had "kick-started" development to get Fennec on Symbian the open source operating system now owned by Nokia.
Sejersen said Mozilla is focusing on Symbian because it has nearly half the market share for smartphones. "So in order for Mozilla to be relevant in the smartphone space we need to have a presence on the Symbian platform," Sejersen wrote.
But Firefox isn't headed to the iPhone, BlackBerry or Google phone anytime soon. "There are a few other platforms: iPhone, RIM and Android that have or are gaining market share, where we for technical or licensing reasons can't be deployed," Sejersen said.
Sejersen laid out a plan which he admitted could be changed for Fennec's Symbian development. Compiling and linking will finish by the end of January, while basic browsing will be sorted by the end of February, with full browsing by the end of April. Testing and turning it into a consumer product would happen after that, but dates were not yet confirmed.
The long-awaited Fennec has only been seen on tablet devices so far, when an alpha version was quietly released earlier this year.
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