It became somewhat silent about Mozilla's Firefox Mobile (code-named "Fennec"), development and except some concept studies, the Mozilla Foundation hasn't unveiled too much about its upcoming/planned Firefox version for smartphones which will also supports Windows Mobile. However, John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla unveiled in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News that the development team might be ready to release a first working prototype soon: "The first thing is to bring Firefox to mobile devices. We're working on that, and we'll see some alphas in a few weeks".

And Lilly knows that the competition gets tougher when he said: "We know we have to build a great Firefox 3 and 3.1 and 4, and great mobile browsers, or people won't care as much about our products".

At the moment, the definitive benchmark is Opera Mobile 9.5, the preferred Windows Mobile browser but I'm quite sure, Mozilla has the experience to develop something similar good and Firefox Mobile will have one advantage over Opera Mobile: The Mozilla Foundation already announced that it will be available free of charge, an argument you can hardly beat.

Cheers ~ Arne