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What's different about a phone?

True mobile browsing won't be just about getting the look and feel of the desktop web on a phone. Even when Fennec can support everything that you can do in Firefox on the desktop, web pages still might not look the same on a mobile device; not because you can't do something, but because you choose not to. "This where it gets philosophical and interesting," says Sullivan. "Do you want the same site, or do you want a different site? There's disagreement even within the Mozilla community... If you look at a full site on your phone it can be harder to use and not what you need. Take auto insurance. If I went to aa.co.uk: if I go to the web site they're going to offer me a trip planner and all these tips, and car insurance, and probably home insurance? If I go to AA on my phone I've probably just been in an accident and I want one click to make a phone call, or I need my insurance card number that I never have. I think what will happen is we'll slap the whole web on the phone and people will say 'Whoa! Let's step back here!' There are different use cases involved. At least you'll be able to develop those use cases; we'll look at the user agent and serve up slightly different style sheets. And we'll evangelise, we'll say 'here's some examples of good and bad design'."

"There's also the question of what is different about a phone and what am I going to do with it? If I want to write a web site that uses location, or uses the accelerometer when I tilt it, or uses the camera. What's new and different is we're exposing this through JavaScript, so web developers can have at it." One of the reasons that the browser that comes out of the Fennec project will be called Firefox, rather than Firefox Mobile, is that there are far fewer differences between the desktop and mobile world than you'd expect. Location on the PC might come from a Wi-Fi service, rather than GPS or cell tower location, but it's still useful for searches, and cameras are becoming common on notebooks. Beyond telephony and SMS, Sullivan says there are few unique mobile features. "As we look into it, every time we think we've found a feature, that's kind of a mobile feature, we say that should be in Firefox too. And the Awesome bar is even more important on mobile than on the desktop, because typing is harder."

The Weave project, for syncing browser metadata through the cloud, will also be important for mobile, he believes. "Weave is about the idea that you can have a seamless experience between your PC and your mobile phone. Say you want to go out tonight, and you want look up a restaurant, you should be able to pick up your phone and pick up where you left off, so we're working on a Fennec version. We are working on bringing cookies over, and the password manager. For the Awesome bar to work really well you want your last several months of history. You have to educate each new phone you buy; imagine if the Awesome bar just works so you only have to type a few letters."

Although processors and phone operating systems are getting more sophisticated, there are still some ways phones really are different and battery life and data costs are key. "There are good and bad ways to build sites. If you make a mistake the PC will hide it, the mobile is less forgiving. The flip side of giving developers powerful tools is we have to evangelise how to be good citizens, because it's going to wear down your battery if you don't use it the right way. Where it's possible technically what we can do is, potentially, build in throttling mechanisms, so you don't do runaway GPS lookups. We're kind of in a new space where the user experience and protecting users does trump everything else."

Privacy is also an important issue once location is involved and Sullivan disagrees with the suggestion that the Gears team made at Google IO last year, to have privacy preferences emerge from user behaviour, rather than be a setting in a dialog. "I think location is too sensitive for that. Having preferences is fine: the user should have to opt in. That's the only consistent way. You want standard APIs and underneath that you want a common model of opt-in. I think transparency is the key - and fine grain control. Once you've opted in you need to be able to go back to something in the settings and say show me everywhere I've opted in, so I can go back and turn it off, or delete them all, or add in the ones I didn't let use it before."

That means educating users about how location works ("we're talking about Wi-Fi location, cell triangulation - they don't know what that means") and perhaps about privacy too. "We had a little flap with Facebook last week," he points out; people don't know all that Google knows about them. It's going to become a bigger and bigger issue. We're going to have a conversation about this."

Next: The importance of being open

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