Mozilla is working on a new browser that uses the WebKit rendering engine, meaning it will be possible to run it on iOS as well as on other mobile operating systems such as Android and Blackberry.

Until now, Mozilla has remained faithful to the Gecko rendering engine, but this can’t be used on iOS due to Apple’s block on rendering engines other than WebKit.

The new browser has been codenamed Junior, and according to a video presentation from Mozilla,  is an iPad browser that makes browsing more fun, more ergonomic and re-thinks browser user experience from the ground up.

In the presentation, Mozilla's Alex Limi described Safari on the iPad as "a miserable experience", and said that while Safari has until now been the best choice for browsing on iOS, iPad Junior will be a better choice.

The demo showed a full screen browser with no address bar or tabs. Two buttons give you a back arrow and a plus button. When clicked, this lets you open new pages, re-open recently viewed pages, and go to bookmarked pages. The browser also offers private browsing, and the ability to have separate accounts for the different users of the device.

The prototype of the browser has, according to the presentation, mainly been developed using Appcelerator’s Titanium framework. This has speeded the development of the prototype because of the ability to create native iOS applications in JavaScript. However, the developers say that the framework has limitations that have posed difficulties, meaning they will probably have to re-implement the final version in Objective-C.

It’s unlikely there’ll be a prototype of Junior for testing. While Mozilla usually does this, fitting in with the iOS application distribution rules means it’s not going to happen this time.

More Information

Product Design at Mozilla

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