I'd blame apple, not firefox. What's the point in them wasting their time just skinning something that is guaranteed to be slower than Safari?
Chances are that it might still not be as fast as Safari, but Firefox should bite the bullet and just do it because:
a. Firefox cannot afford to not be on all platforms. With computing devices converging and relying on handshakes (data syncing?), missing out on a major mobile platform is foolish.
b. In a related point, syncing bookmarks/tabs via Firefox sync is severely handicapped by it's absence on iOS.
c. There is a fantastic niche where FF can fit in on iOS. It'd be as privacy centric as Safari and with an iOS launch would be cross-platform like Chrome (without Google peddling their products front and centre). They could also get some inspiration from mobile Opera on iOS that has fantastic data saving features in-built.
Developing an Apple-compliant Firefox for iOS would mean developing an entirely separate browser, which basically wouldn't share a single line of code with either Firefox Desktop, Firefox for Android, Firefox OS or Firefox for Firefox OS, plus it would be using a (reduced version of) WebKit, so it would not have the same behavior as the other Firefoxen and it would require yet different Firefox Development Tools.
If this platform was a high priority, this might be feasible, but it might take several years, at the expense of some other project and Apple would still be in position to shoot down Firefox for iOS (again).
So I don't think that this is going to happen any time soon.
1: 30min in @ https://air.mozilla.org/product-design-at-mozilla/
> What's the point in them wasting their time just skinning something that is guaranteed to be slower than Safari
I'd say, consistency of user experience and sync'ing my bookmarks etc. Skipping iOS means you are losing a reasonable chunk of users who fall in the category of wanting the same browser on all their devices.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a single non-developer who is even aware there is a difference in rendering engines (or javascript engines). The maximum they might know is that "this site is broken with that browser", but that won't relate to "rendering engine" in their mind.
So brining Firefox to iOS would give an awesome benefit for many users that love Firefox on the desktop, and encourage others for which the absence of Firefox on iOS is a nuisance or a blocker in its adoption.
Even ignoring the point someone raised of increasing the workload of already strained resources.
And people are not "too dumb to realize". The whole point of the HTML standard is to make sure that all browser render the same. The whole point of the standard, and all the efforts of all the browsers, go towards a single goal: making all pages render equal on all browsers, that is making people NOT realize there is a difference; the technical problem of different codebases exhibiting different behaviors in rendering is just that, a technical problem to be solved.
I maintain that the developer-centric position of focusing on Gecko and thus refusing a iOS port as "useless", is actually doing Firefox lots of harm in its adoption. Firefox is the product, not Gecko.
Moreover, even if Apple eventually lifted the restriction, you want to be ready that day; you would still have to port the whole browser in addition to Gecko, including non-trivial issues like the extensions, and coordinating a solution for using extensions on all mobile platforms require years; the ecosystem of extensions need to adapt and evolve over the time. Releasing, maintaining, optimizing and evolving a Webkit-based Firefox on iOS would be still a gigantic effort and would still bring benefit; you're then free not to use it, if you only need Firefox as a way to use Gecko.
If that's the case, why is Webkit turning into IE6 on mobile? Apple is totally at fault.
> even if Apple eventually lifted the restriction, you want to be ready that day
Better stop all work on Linux, Microsoft might release their kernel as GPL someday and all this work is being wasted. See, it works for silly things too. Why should Mozilla be at the whims of Apple?
As for the straining resources, focusing on yet another product also affects me. Thunderbird has been left to rot, and while I don't really resent it because the Boot2Gecko project is very interesting, you can't just say that Mozilla should maintain a separate fork with WebKit because Apple says so. What if Microsoft does the same thing in the future, should they just fork it a third time?
uh? of course Apple is at fault there (and I never said otherwise), but this point is orthogonal to the opportunity of having Firefox on iOS with the current restrictions.
>> even if Apple eventually lifted the restriction, you want to be ready that day
> Better stop all work on Linux, Microsoft might release their kernel as GPL someday and all this work is being wasted. See, it works for silly things too.
Uh??? I'm not suggesting Firefox to drop Gecko, not at all. I'm saying that Firefox should use Webkit on iOS until Apple allows Mozilla to use Gecko (if ever), and that this would bring lots of value to the Firefox ecosystem and to Mozilla, because it would push Firefox market share for increased ecosystem effect.