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Mozilla's Fennec Mobile Browser to Get Firefox-Like Extensions

As we've covered many times, one of the primary reasons for the growing success of Mozilla's Firefox browser is the thriving ecosystem of useful extensions for it, created by the user community. Mozilla is also generating increasing buzz with its innovative, open source mobile browser called Fennec. As we covered here, Fennec is available in an Alpha version for Windows Mobile, and you can see it in action in a video here. One of the big questions surrounding Fennec has been whether Mozilla will try to replicate the success of extensions for Firefox with useful extensions for Fennec, which could make it more flexible and extensible than other mobile browsers. Now, it looks like Mozilla has that goal squarely on its radar.

In this post from Mozilla, the Fennec team points to "a small but growing" collection of Fennec-specific extenstion developer resources. You can find an overview of the resources here. There is an Architecture Overview, a discussion of Extension Basics, example Code Snippets, and a set of Best Practices for developing useful extensions. The Best Practices post discusses not wasting valuable screen space when building extensions, and much more.

Mozilla will also be delivering fully fleshed-out tutorials on building Fennec extensions, and the company confirms that developers will be able to build extensions that can work on both the Maemo platform and Windows Mobile. Especially since developers can write for multiple platforms, it's almost a certainty that useful Fennec extensions will appear. The real challenge for Mozilla will be to ignite the kind of passionate interest in developing extensions for its mobile browser that there is in the Firefox extension community. If Mozilla can foster that, Fennec could become a powerful new player among mobile browsers.

• firefox
• mozilla
• extensions
• Fennec
• Mobile Browser

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