Mozilla Stops Developing Firefox Mobile For Windows Phone 7 Series

Mozilla, the organisation in charge of popular browser Firefox, has confirmed that it will not be developing any mobile browser for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform.

Stuart Parmenter, the director in charge of mobile browsing at Mozilla, said on his personal blog that "While we think Windows Phone 7 looks interesting and has the potential to do well in the market, Microsoft has unfortunately decided to close off development to native applications. Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold."

The not-so-surprising announcement leaves the field wide open for Opera to inundate the Windows Mobile platform with its own Opera Mini and Mobile browsers.

Microsoft itself has been slightly reluctant at committing resources to develop a competent mobile Internet Explorer browser for its own platform let alone the others. Both Google and Apple have yet to confirm whether they will launch native browsers for competing platform.

Parmerter has confirmed though that Mozilla will be focusing on building "great consumer product" for Android and Maemo but strangely enough Nokia and Intel's new platform called Meego hasn't been mentioned.

That said, things might change should Windows Phone 7 Series pick up more momentum by the end of the year and/or if Microsoft launches the native development kit earlier than expected.