Mozilla building ‘Junior’ browser for iOS

The past week has witnessed quite a number of revelations by some of the giants concerned with the computing world. With Apple revealing iOS 6, Microsoft revealing Surface Tablets, leakage of Xbox 720 and Kinect 2 details, and many more, Mozilla has just jumped into the fray with ‘Junior’, a web browser for iOS.

Mozilla, one of the giants when it comes to web browsers for desktop (and laptop) systems, has decided to give iOS users a bite of its famous browser. Mozilla has put to display a demonstration of their experimental browser ‘Junior’ for the iOS platform. Since Apple’s restrictions on the developer ecosystem for iOS prevents Mozilla from using Gecko, the HTML rendering engine which powers Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla is developing Junior based on the WebKit rendering engine.

WebKit is the same rendering engine used by all other browsers that run on iOS. Hence, iOS users won’t be able to taste the pure port of Firefox on their devices, unlike the Android users who enjoy a pure mobile port of the browser. So, the only visible difference of ‘Junior’ from other third-party iOS browsers might be surrounding the user interface and whatever else clever features Mozilla can cook up.

At this time Junior is still a prototype and said to have a simple user interface that does not use tabs:

The prototype has a very simple full-screen user interface without conventional tabs or a navigation toolbar. Users switch between websites by using a separate interface that combines the concepts of tabs and history.

Excited users will have to wait ’till Junior reaches Apple App Store to test it out, due to restrictions imposed by Apple on the sharing of developmental builds. However, while you wait, you can wet your appetite by watching the video below:

[via Ars Technica]

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