Mozilla Shows Off 'Junior' Browser for iPad

Mozilla last week showed off a browser for the iPad, dubbed Junior.

Junior is now a WebKit-based, full-screen browser that Mozilla said will be far superior to the built-in Safari browser Apple includes on its iOS devices.

"If you look at Safari on the iPad, it's a pretty miserable experience, I think," Alex Limi, a product designer at Firefox, said during a recent presentation to co-workers. "It feels like it's the one app where they took the desktop version, pulled out the UI, and slapped it into the iPad."

As a result, Mozilla's product design strategy team set out to build a better browser for the iPad. What they came up with is Junior, which "gives you a magazine-like feel," to Web browsing, said Mozilla designer Trond Werner Hansen.

In portrait mode, Junior will have two buttons on the screen at the thumb level: a backwards arrow button on the left that serves as the back button; and a plus button on the right that takes you to a menu of browsing options.

That menu (above) includes about 20 icons for favorite or recently visited sites, like CNN, Netflix, or Amazon. Those website icons have been dubbed "containers" - click them to view recently viewed pages within the sites. Full views of those sites are also available atop the containers in a scrollable format.

The menu also "removes the need for tab management," Hansen said by putting tabs and history in the same place.

"On a casual device like the iPad, you do browsing a little differently than the hardcore users on the desktop," he said. "You constantly move forward - you look up things, you read things, etc."

The iPad can also be a family device, used by parents and kids alike. As a result, Junior includes multi-user sign-ins (above), letting mom, dad, and kids preserve their own favorites and history.

Junior probably won't land in the App Store in the immediate future. It was built using Titanium, which allows for JavaScript coding. But it still needs to be ported into native code by iOS developers, "so there are still things to do," Hansen said.

In a statement, Mozilla said that "Junior is an early-stage experimental project and is not confirmed for development by Mozilla or for a future version of Firefox. All projects and experiments at Mozilla are developed in the open to gather ideas and feedback."

Mozilla, meanwhile, is its Boot to Gecko project, or the development of a "complete, standalone operating system for the open Web."

Editor's Note: This story was updated Tuesday with comment from Mozilla.