Fennec coming for Symbian-based S60 mobile platform

As Firefox Mobile, code named Fennec, approaches its second alpha (due this week), Mozilla’s Christian Sejersen announced today that Mozilla will port Fennec to S60, Nokia’s Symbian-based mobile platform, and the most popular overall, currently commanding about half the total installed base, effectively quadrupling the number of  potential users for Mozilla’s mobile web browser.

Together with the other supported platforms, Windows Mobile and Maemo (Linux for Nokia Internet Tablets), Mozilla will reach about 65% of the mobile market.

Development for S60 is already under way with some of the building blocks like Gecko, the JavaScript engine, and HTML parser already completed and ready for the next steps that include Necko (Mozilla’s networking engine) to get a functional versions by the end of March next year.

While there are at least two major Symbian-based platforms (UIQ being the other), the port will focus on S60 Third Edition (based on Symbian 9.1) and later, which includes the N95, and other Nokia, LG, and Samsung smartphones.

Most interestingly, according to Christian’s post, Symbian is helping Mozilla with engineers to properly size and scope the project, while “Symbian houses”  are interested in contributing.

On other platforms, Christian commented: “There are a few other platforms: iPhone, RIM and Android that have or are gaining market share, where we for technical or licensing reasons can’t be deployed.”