Mozilla CEO: Mobile Web Browsing Needs to Improve
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Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Image(NEW YORK) — Chances are you spend most of your time using apps on your phone, while the Web browser takes a backseat. Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, acknowledges that the industry has fallen short in improving mobile Web browsers.
“We haven’t done a great job [on mobile browsing]. I’m expecting someone will do a[n] Apple on the whole browsing experience,” outgoing Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said at the All Things D: Dive Into Mobile conference Monday in New York City.
Apple revolutionized the entire phone business when it debuted the iPhone in 2007, something that hasn’t happened to mobile websites. Kovacs added that he anticipates the mobile browser will provide an “entirely different experience” in the near future.
What that experience might look like Kovacs didn’t detail, but Mozilla is betting big on its own contributions to mobile browsing. The company announced its Firefox OS earlier this year; the operating system for phones is based on its Firefox browser. Phones running the Firefox OS software will launch this June in countries like Poland and Brazil, but won’t arrive in the U.S. until 2014.
The company has already partnered with Sprint.
Mozilla currently offers a mobile version of its Firefox browser for Android. It’s not available on the iPhone, Kovacs said, because “iOS has a policy where you have to use their Web engine. Our Web engine is very different.” The company does not want to adjust that, he explained.
Kovacs announced Monday that he would be stepping down as the CEO of Mozilla this year. “I learned in college that you don’t want to stay at a party too long,” he said at the conference. “It’s time for me to move on to other things.”
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio