Fennec: No More Mozilla Browser for Windows Mobile

Mar 25, 2010

The lead developer of Mozilla's mobile group has announced in his blog that development of Fennec on Windows Mobile has been put indefinitely on hold.

Stuart Parmenter, responsible for mobile device development at the Mozilla Foundation, shared with everyone in his blog the reasons for the Windows Mobile retraction. According to Parmenter, "Microsoft has unfortunately decided to close off development to native applications." It seems that anyone wishing to write a program for Microsoft's mobile platform has to do so in Silverlight or XNA (mainly for games).

Even though Parmeter finds the new Windows platform "interesting," neither of the two programming options could be considered for a well performing mobile Firefox. Fennec development would then be concentrated appropriately on the Android and Maemo/MeeGo platforms, which do have corresponding SDKs that allow programming of native applications.

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