For more and more people mobile devices are the primary way, or even the only way, to access the Web. Firefox for iOS (codenamed Fennec like its Android counterpart) is an open, hackable, standards-based browser, just like the desktop Firefox.
Note: Firefox for iOS is still in prerelease development form so there's not much available yet in the way of user support. As the project nears launch, support resources will begin to be posted.
Firefox for iOS constructs its user interface from native widgets instead of XUL; this greatly improves performance, especially startup time, and memory consumption. Because of Apple's App Store restrictions, it also uses the built in iOS UIWebView on iOS, which is based on WebKit rather than Gecko.
Contribute to Firefox for iOS
We're hard at work building Firefox for iOS, and we welcome your help! The main starting point for anyone interested in contributing to the Firefox for iOS project is the GitHub page.
You can help us to create and improve Firefox for iOS:
- Subscribe to the mobile-firefox-dev mailing list
- Contact the team over IRC
- Join in our Wednesday development meeting
- Keep up to date with project news on Planet Firefox Mobile, Tumblr and Twitter
- Build and hack on Firefox for iOS (Fennec)
Opening links in Firefox iOS
Its not possible to change the default browser on iOS. Because of that, users that want to use a third party browser have to resort to copy-paste tricks. Alternatively, there are some things you can do in your native apps to make these users happy:
- Make the iOS App extensions system available to your users. Firefox for iOS provides some app extensions that make opening, bookmarking, and adding to the Firefox Reading List possible from your app. nshipster has a good overview on how to add a UIActivityViewController to you app.
- Use the Open-In-Firefox SDK to easily detect if Firefox is installed and show it as an option for your users. In future releases, this will also make it easy for users to return to your app after reading an article in Firefox.
Addons
Firefox for iOS supports the native iOS extension ecosystem right now, but doesn't (yet) support JavaScript add-ons like Desktop or Android Firefox.
Get help
Documentation and tutorials for using and troubleshooting Firefox for iOS are available on the Mozilla Support website.