Firefox finally launches for the iPhone and iPad

Will iOS users who like Safari and Chrome give the new Firefox browser a shot?Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET

Firefox is now officially an iOS app.

Launched on Apple's App Store Thursday,Firefox is the latest major mobile browser available to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users.

Apple's built-in Safari is the default browser for iOS, the software that powers those Apple devices, and Google's Chrome has long been available for them. Opera also makes a browser for Apple's mobile devices, though its not nearly as popular as its rivals.

Late to the party, Firefox faces an uphill battle duking it out with Safari and Chrome. The mobile market is a priority for browser makers since users increasingly are browsing the Web via their smartphones and tablets rather than desktop and laptop computers.

Firefox will attempt to lure users with a variety of features.

The browser keeps track of all your open pages using visual thumbnails, so you can see and jump to any recent page. You can open as many tabs as you want without losing your open pages. Every tab you open is numbered, so you can add and find Web content for each one.

You can choose your default search provider, including Google, Yahoo and Bing as well as Amazon, Twitter, Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo. Firefox also lets you easily switch from one to another.

Concerned about security? You can open a new Web page in a private browsing mode so your history and cookies aren't saved. You can also delete your browsing history, passwords and other private data with just one tap.

Set up a Firefox Account, and you can sync your browsing history, tabs and passwords to Firefox for iOS from PCs and other devices that run the browser. Firefox can also keep track of the passwords you use across different devices.

Finally, you can save Web pages to a reading list so you can read them offline.

Mozilla initially resisted a move to iOS, saying that Apple's mobile operating system was too closed for third-party browsers. It changed its mind late last year after Apple launched iOS 8 with a friendlier environment for non-Apple browsers. There's also a sizable audience to be considered. A tweet almost a year ago by Mozilla release manager Lukas Blakk said simply: "We need to be where our users are so we're going to get Firefox on iOS."

Because of restrictions imposed by Apple, this version of Firefox uses the same core browser technology as Safari, a software package called WebKit, not Mozilla's own competing Gecko package. Just as Google has done with Chrome on iOS, Mozilla has put a Firefox wrapper around Apple's browsing technology.

"The iOS share of the mobile market continues to grow, and we are always looking for new ways to bring people into the Firefox ecosystem," a Mozilla spokesman said. "Being on iOS and giving people a connected Firefox experience helps us achieve that goal."

Firefox for iOS is free to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users and is optimized for the large screen of the iPad Pro.

Mozilla holds its nose and supports DRM video in Firefox

Mozilla has agreed, reluctantly, to build a Web standard called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) into its Firefox browser, a step that enables use of copy-protected video from Netflix and other sources on the Web.

The nonprofit organization has opposed EME, a technology that lets a browser perform digital rights management (DRM) tasks such as restricting copying or ensuring that rights to watch a video expire after a certain period of time. But on Wednesday, Mozilla said it's enabling EME because it's becoming widely enough used that its absence from Firefox would push people toward other browsers.

"Looking at the competitive landscape, every single major player in the browser market has adopted this spec and the prop module that comes with it," said Chief Technology Officer Andreas Gal. "We are concerned that if we don't do this, our users don't have access to a significant part of the Web."

It's not the first time pragmatism won out over principles at Mozilla. It was also opposed to the patent-encumbered H.264 video codec, which is widely used to compress and decompress video for Internet streaming, but decided it had no choice but to support it for Web-based video. Mozilla favors openness on the Web, and patent-encumbered, proprietary software is the antithesis.

Mozilla isn't writing the DRM decryption software itself, something that would be impossible to ship in an open-source product like Firefox. Instead, Mozilla has a partnership to install a module from Adobe Systems, a close relative of what it ships in its Flash Player browser plugin. Firefox will download the DRM module after people install the browser, but it activates only when a user visits a site that uses the technology and grants authorization.

Historically, streaming-video sites that want DRM have used browser plugins including Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight. But Adobe's browser plug-in is being gradually excised from desktop browsers and from new Web sites. Flash doesn't run at all on mobile devices using Apple's iOS, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Mozilla's Firefox OS, or Google's Android. The situation has posed a challenge for those who want the Web to be an all-purpose computing foundation.

Thus, some developers at Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have been working on an alternative, EME.

EME is being standardized through the World Wide Web Consortium and currently is in draft form. In January, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) joined the W3C. The EME spec has been a point of controversy for years, though; among prominent opponents has been Ian Hickson, who for years has been a leader in the standardization of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), one of the seminal standards that makes Web possible. He was involved in shepherding video support into HTML, a direction that ultimately led to today's DRM complications.

EME doesn't actually handle encryption itself. Instead, a mechanism to communicate with a DRM plugin called a content decryption module (CDM) that does. That means a Web app can show encrypted media, helping Web developers match the abilities of programmers who write native software that runs directly on operating systems like iOS or Windows.

Mozilla doesn't like EME, though, and not just because it's proprietary software. The approach is complicated for Web developers, too: Safari, Internet Explorer, and Chrome each ship with a different CDM, which means Web sites must check what browser a visitor is using then send the encrypted video with the appropriate system.

"The situation is really sad," Gal said. "It's a direct consequence of fact that the EME spec is not really a spec -- it just says there is a black box and here is how you talk to the black box."

One of Mozilla's big complaints with DRM, as implemented today, is something called node locking. That's a technology that confines content like video or audio to a single device, and it's an approach that stands in sharp contrast to the current cloud-computing philosophy of the industry.

With that philosophy, people are used to getting their documents, e-mails, and photos from whatever device they have on hand -- a smartphone, a tablet, a PC. Node locking means it's not necessarily easy to watch a TV episode on your smartphone on the way to work if you bought it on your PC.

Mozilla is taking a slightly different approach to node locking, though. Instead of letting the CDM build a device fingerprint based on hardware details of a computing device, it supplies its own node identifier to add a bit of privacy, Gal said.

To do that, Mozilla confines the CDM to a sandbox. It's open-source software, so the content industry can make sure it works as advertised and privacy advocates can see that it doesn't pose privacy problems, Gal said.

Ultimately, Mozilla would prefer the content industry to abandon node locking, moving instead to permissions based on an account, not a device.

But so far, there's no sign movie and TV studios are willing to yield. "They are simply not open to the argument right now," Gal said. "One of our hopes is as that as technology progresses, at some point the content industry will recognize they're not doing themselves a favor."

Another change Mozilla would like is a move away from DRM and toward watermarking, which embeds invisible data in video files that can determine

With watermarking, "if someone takes video stream against the license, you can detect who did that," Gal said.

Mozilla fills feature gaps with Firefox OS 1.1 release

Firefox OS's adaptive app search feature is now front and center with version 1.1 of the operating system. The feature retrieves a list of Web sites and Web apps based on search terms, and if people like the results, they can save apps to their home screen for future use.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Mozilla announced on Wednesday it's finished Firefox OS 1.1, filling in a large number of missing features, improving performance, and securing some new commitments from carriers that are helping back the browser-based operating system for mobile phones.

Firefox 1.0 debuted earlier this year for the first generation of mobile phones, generally low-end models targeted at feature-phone owners who wanted to take the smartphone plunge but who didn't want to spend the money required for higher-end Android or iOS devices. As with many first-version operating systems, though, there were a lot of missing pieces.

Now, along with performance improvements including smoother scrolling and faster app loading, a host of those missing pieces have been added, according to a blog post by Chris Lee, director of the Firefox OS product. Among the new features, which are due to ship to Firefox OS users "soon," are the following:

• Promotion of the adaptive app search feature to the home screen. The feature lets people type to search for apps stored on their phone to get a list of Web sites and apps and bookmark ones they like for later use. (People also can find apps through the Firefox Marketplace.)
• The ability to import contacts from Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail, not just from Facebook.
• Support for picture messaging with MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service).
• A programming interface to let developers send push notifications.
• Autocorrect for keyboard typing.
• Music search, which lets people swipe down from the top of the music app to find music based on artist, song, or album.
• The ability to save photos, videos, and audio from the browser.
• The ability to save draft e-mails, to download audio and video e-mail attachments, and to attach gallery images to e-mails.
• The ability to long-press on an entry from a call log to add that information to a new or existing entry in the contact list.
• The ability to create a new calendar entry by tapping on the desired time slot on the calendar.

Firefox OS is key to Mozilla's attempt to stay relevant in an era in which people use mobile phones and tablets as well as personal computers. The nonprofit organization's mission is to keep the Web open, and an important part of that is influencing Web standards. Having a lot of users means that Mozilla's support for new standards -- or its decisions not to support them -- can have a lot of influence on the future of the Web. If Firefox isn't used, though, that influence dwindles.

Carrier allies speak out"Existing Firefox OS users will be upgraded to the latest version soon," Mozilla said in a separate blog post.

Carriers are central to Mozilla's Firefox OS plans, and on Tuesday, the first three partners expanded on their plans for the phones.

Firefox OS device sales in Spain, Colombia, and Venezuela "have surpassed our expectations," said Yotam Ben-Ami, director of open web devices at Telefonica, Mozilla's initial Firefox OS partner. "We now look forward to bringing the benefits of Firefox OS to our customers in Brazil and three other Latin America markets during Q4 2013 as well as making it available through many more Telefonica operating businesses during 2014."

Another carrier, Telenor, said it will bring Firefox OS phones to Hungary, Serbia, and Montenegro this year. Sales in the company's Asian markets will take place after that, the company said.

Thomas Kiessling, chief product and innovation officer at Deutsche Telekom, called his company's launch of Firefox OS phones in Poland "very successful" and said it will begin selling the phones to customers of its Congstar brand in Germany. It will introduce the phones in Greece and Hungary "soon," he said.

Hard transition
The mobile-computing transition has been hard for Mozilla. Firefox has a vanishingly small presence on Android phones and in effect can't run on iOS, Windows Phone, or Windows RT, so Firefox OS is central the organization's push for relevance. Gaining a foothold against Android, which is spreading rapidly to low-cost phones in new markets, intensifies Mozilla's challenge.

Firefox OS is a browser-based operating system, meaning that is uses the same browser rendering engine at the heart of Firefox running on PCs not just to display Web pages but also to run Web apps. Mozilla has pushed a suite of Web standards that give Web apps many of the abilities that native apps get on rival OSes like iOS and Android.

Mozilla has attracted a large number of partners, though -- notably mobile network operators that would like alternatives that don't cede as much control to the Google and Apple juggernauts.

Carriers selling Firefox OS phones have settled on two models so far, the ZTE Open and the Alcatel One Touch Fire. A smaller smartphone maker, Geeksphone, has committed to shipping Firefox OS 1.1 on its Peak+ phone.