Firefox Coming to Android-based Tablets This Year (mockups and more)

Facing heavy competition from Google Chrome, the Firefox team seems to have stepped up their game. With a faster development cycle, the award winning open source project has gotten more ambitious than ever. Ubiquity being one of Mozilla’s main goals this year, Firefox will be the first open-source browser to enter the rapidly growing tablet market. If all goes well, we may be able to see Firefox 8, which releases later this year, on Honeycomb tablets everywhere. Here are some early features and their mockups which have been outlined for the release.

Mozilla has plans to release the mobile version of their browser, known as Fennec, for Honeycomb-based Android tablet devices later this year. So, the UI for the tablet devices will be similar to the mobile UI but will include many enhancements that will make it more tablet-friendly. Firefox plans to bring a rich, touch-friendly, magazine-like feel to web browsing on these fast-blooming devices. From the first release itself, the trademark Awesome bar will be an integral part of the User Interface with some tweaks. The focus however, will be to make use of the screen space as much as possible so as to provide a magazine-like feel for which tablets are known for. On the features front, the tablet version will just be the mobile version tweaked to run on the bigger devices. Here are some early mockups of how the final version might look like.

A rough mockup of the UI

Mockup 1

Tabs on the left

Tabs on the right side

Tabs across the top

Awesome bar on Fennec

Fennec for tablets will probably be released with Firefox 8 which comes out later this year. The work on tablet UI has already started, so we might be able to see Firefox on Motorola XOOM and other new devices by Christmas. Also, please keep in mind that these are just early mockups, the final version may end up looking quite different.

Image sources :

Logo : flod

Mockups :  anbarlow_work and Brian The Designer