Mozilla abandons Windows Mobile

Mozilla's Mobile Team Technical Lead, Stuart Parmenter, has announced that Mozilla have put development of Firefox for Windows Mobile, also known as Fennec, on hold. Parmenter explained in a blog posting that although development on Firefox for Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 had been progressing, the announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series by Microsoft – and Microsoft's closing off of native development for that platform – meant that it would not be possible to bring Firefox for Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 Series. Parmenter said "Given that Microsoft are staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don't know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold".

The work done and experience gained by the engineering, QA, build and automation teams will be reused on other platforms, but the build and test automation systems will be disabled "shortly". Parmenter hopes that in the future Microsoft would provide Mozilla a way to build Firefox for Windows Phone 7, but said that current plans were to focus on platforms which Mozilla had more access to, namely Android and Maemo.

See also:

• Mozilla releases Firefox for Maemo 1.0, a report from The H.
• New preview of Fennec on Windows Mobile, a report from The H.

(djwm)