A lot of things seem to be changing in Firefox Land since CEO Chris Beard took over this year. Recently, Mozilla announced a five-year partnership with Yahoo, which sees the search engine replacing Google as the default search experience in the Firefox web browser in the U.S.
That alone was a huge move as it had been with Google for a decade. It has also added advertising to the browser experience, and launched some new privacy-related features and a developer-specific version of its browser.
Another thing on Mozilla’s list is apparently getting iOS users to use the browser. While Firefox has been available for Android for years now, Mozilla has historically indicated that it wouldn’t be making the browser available for iOS. The problem has been that Mozilla can’t use its rendering engine on iOS as Apple requires browsers to use the WebKit engine that’s employed by Safari and Chrome.
Under the new management, however, things may soon change. Mozilla executives indicated they want to get the browser on Apple’s popular operating system. After that sparked some interest in the blogosphere, Mozilla posted this statement to its blog:
At Mozilla, we put our users first and want to provide an independent choice for them on any platform. We are in the early stages of experimenting with something that allows iOS users to be able to choose a Firefox-like experience.
We work in the open at Mozilla and are just starting to experiment, so we’ll update you when we have more to share.
That’s certainly a good start as far as Firefox fans are concerned. Unfortunately, Mozilla is pretty late to the game on this one, and will have to overcome longtime iOS users’ habits of using browsers like Safari and Chrome.
Image via Joshua Wolford