Desktop Web browsing is so yesterday. It is the coming boom in the wireless market everyone's got their eye on nowadays. So it didn't come as surprise when Mozilla announced it was developing a mobile version of its popular Firefox web browser last October.

Head over to the Mozilla wiki and you'll find, if not the first fruits, then the first designs of this endeavor. There you'll see early mockups and descriptions of what should become a version of Firefox for PDAs and smartphones.

The wiki covers potential user interface designs for standard and touch-screen of Firefox Mobile, with and without a QWERTY thumb-keyboard. Images picture a main screen with and without a URL toolbar, in addition to the URL entry screen and page load screen. History and bookmark management and a tab screen with thumbnails of web pages are are also covered.

  

When Mozilla announced plans for Firefox Mobile, it said the goal was to provide a full-fledged Firefox experience to mobile-device users. It added the whole Mozilla community would be taking part in the development process.

A list of supported devices hasn't been finalized yet and the browser itself isn't expected to become available until after the close of 2008. Linux mobiles would be obvious, but so would Windows Mobile handhelds and possibly Symbian phones. Who knows, with Apple opening up the iPhone to third-party development, maybe even an edition of Firefox for the iPhone is in the offing.

The wireless browser market, already crowded when Mozilla made its Firefox mobile announcement a few months ago, has gotten even more competitive since then. For instance, just the other day, a startup called Skyfire introduced its first product, an eponymous-named Web browser for Windows Mobile (and later for other mobile platforms), at the DEMO 08 conference.

Skyfire received a positive reception, as it appears to deliver a true an even more accurate desktop-like browsing experience to mobile devices than even Apple's Safari browser does for the iPhone. How? Through wide support for all of today's most important Web standards, including dynamic Flash, advanced Ajax, and Java and a proxy server, which does all the hard work before sending a Web page onto a smartphone or PDA.

Although a beta version of the application isn't available for yet, a link to an experimental XUL/JS mockup edition of the software, which you can run on the PC, is at the bottom of the Mozilla wiki page, here that describes and pictures what Mozilla is up to with this project

  

Be aware, not all features described in the wiki are working in the PC download, however.

[via Mozilla Links]