April 25, 2008 7:33 AM PDT

Mobile comes to Firefox (at last!)

by Matt Asay
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Mozilla has shuffled around mobile for several years now, initially with Minimo. Mozilla has finally decided to get into the mobile market in earnest, however, with Fennec.

If Fennec proves to be even a shadow of Firefox's potential, the world will never be the same.

Access to data, sites and applications on the Internet shouldn't be limited by the type of device being used, and Fennec will make that possible, said Mitchell Baker during a keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

"The key to the Internet should be the same. The core is information: What can I get to and what can I do with it?" she said.

Mobile has been fraught with problems since its inception, largely due to corporations carving up their petty niches for profit. With a true, community-developed mobile web platform and entry point, however, we may yet see a rich convergence in mobile, one where a particular mobile device is not an inhibitor to the web, as it has been (giving rise to the need for mobile open-source providers like Volantis).

Originally posted at The Open Road
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.
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