Christian Sejersen confirms Mobile Firefox for Symbian in the works

After dashing the hopes of iPhone/Android fanboys and girls everywhere with last month’s news that Mobile Firefox (Fennec) would not be ported to the two popular/emerging platforms due to licensing and technological reasons, Mozilla has instead turned to the widely adopted (mostly abroad) Symbian platform.

Christian Sejersen, charged with heading up the engineering efforts for Mozilla mobile back in Oct. 2007, posted news of this new partnership on his personal blog today.  He cites recent marketshare stats to support his argument in favor of this new direction:

Q3 2008 Symbian had 49.8% of the total smartphone sales (and 57% in Q2) according to Gartner compared to 11.1% for Windows Mobile and 7.2% for Linux

Symbian has committed in-house engineers to better assist Mozilla in porting Mobile Firefox to its platform.  Sejersen offers an open invitation to members of the greater development community to contribute to the newly proposed project.

[via Christian Sejersen]