Few days ago Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice-president of engineering announced that Mozilla is serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices and has announced that Mobile Firefox is coming in a big way.

When you think of a mobile browser, you may first think about Opera and WebKit, as personally but Mozilla wants to change this. We have already seen the seeds of change as Mike points out:

“You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices.”

Here is what users can expect::

• Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.
• We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on
  mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.
• Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:
  • Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.

I am currently using latest Opera Mobile 8.65 on my HTC P3300 and am waiting for Opera Mobile 9. I really hope that there will be a Windows Mobile version of the browser, since Minimo already runs on that and am now eagerly looking forward  to see and try out 1st final version of Firefox Mobile.