Firefox Home: A not-quite Firefox iPhone app

Well, this is interesting. On Wednesday, Mozilla gave us a heads-up that it was releasing an iPhone app that would "let Firefox users open their favorite Web sites on their iPhones." We assumed this mystery app would be similar to the Opera Mini browser, which dives through a loophole in Apple's notoriously restrictive non-compete clause that keeps developers from supplanting the Safari browser.

Instead of going the proxy browser route, as Opera Mini does, Mozilla's forthcoming app, Firefox Home for iPhone, is based on Mozilla's sync technology. Firefox Sync--previously Weave Sync--lets Web surfers carry over their history, bookmarks, and open tabs across computers and smartphones. The addition of the self-dubbed "Awesome" URL bar in Firefox Home should fast-track the search for sites by remembering your previous and automatically saved searches, even those typed into, say, your desktop browser.

Firefox Home for iPhone presents an intriguing twist on the problem of Apple's SDK. Rather than trying to create an exact replica of the Firefox browser on the iPhone, Mozilla is offering a window to your open Firefox tabs, and an encrypted one at that. A Mozilla spokesperson confirmed that Firefox Home is not a proxy browser. Rather, the app will launch pages in either a Web viewer or Safari.

While Mozilla hasn't yet submitted Firefox Home for iPhone to the App Store, the app's hypothetical acceptance will likely mark the second successful placement in the store of a third-party browser solution that isn't based on Apple's Webkit browser platform.

A day after Opera Mini emerged for iPhone this past April, browser maker Skyfire also announced its intention to follow suit, this time with the promise of streaming Flash video through its proxy servers, but so far we've only seen Skyfire's video-streaming browser operational on Android, and it is Webkit-based at that. There's nothing wrong with that, though the Webkit ties could potentially grease the app's wheels when and if Skyfire submits its browser solution.