Mozilla, the company behind the highly popular Firefox browser for OS X and Windows devices, will not be bringing the Firefox browser to iOS devices until Apple makes a major change in policy. Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX, Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan, noted that Firefox would not appear on iOS devices until Apple allows third party browsers to use their own JavaScript rendering engine Nitro (via CNET). Currently, any third-party browsers for iOS use the UIWebView component, which is moderately slower than Nitro, thus translating to Safari being faster than any third party browser could ever be.
Mozilla says that Apple should change their policies to allow Nitro to be used by third party software, so that any future iOS version of Firefox, or indeed the Google Chrome browser, could use the faster rendering engine.
According to StatCounter, Chome and Firefox account for 37.1% and 21.3% of total global browser usage as of February this year, with Safari accounting for only 8.6% of usage. As such, it would be of great advantage to iOS users to be able to choose to use Firefox on their mobile device, although Apple will likely be conscious that they would not want to give up any market share.
Strap On The Nitro…