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With the release of Firefox 3 around the corner, Mozilla Labs shows off their Firefox mobile mockup in a video demonstration. Aza Raskin, Mozilla’s Head of User Experience, demonstrated the mobile version. Now you don’t need to use any Webkit.

According to Aza Raskin

Firefox is coming to mobile. The innovation, usability, and extensibility that has propelled Firefox to 200 million users is set to do the same for Firefox in a mobile setting.

User experience is the most important aspect of having a compelling mobile product. Every bit of interaction and pixel of presentation counts when typing is laborious and screen sizes are minuscule. Many of the standard interaction models, like menus, always-present chrome, and having a cursor, don’t necessarily make sense on mobile. It’s a wickedly exciting opportunity but there are myriad challenges to getting it right.

Using a keypad of a cell phone while browsing on internet is just like a nightmare (though Firefox will be available for non-touch screen too), so they have designed it for touch screens. Screen size in a mobile phone is limited so they have tried to create some room for the user by providing better navigation system and by giving as much space as possible to the content. Although the demo is given, it is still a conceptual mockup and the final version may be different from this one, but at least it has provided a glimpse of what is about to come.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Getting started with the browser, you will see your ‘Bookmarks’ at the right and a big ‘+’ sign (which opens a new tab/page) at the left side of the browser. Clicking on a specific bookmark will zoom the browser to that page. It allows you to scroll the page by either flicking or by dragging. If you want to zoom out of a page, all you have to do is to drag the page to its border in any direction that means that you can zoom out by throwing the page in any direction (now thats cool because it will also let you throw your frustration out). Some standard controls (back, forward, bookmark and page info) are located at the left side of the page.

With browsers like Opera, Safari and Skyfire already in the market, it would be really exciting to see Firefox getting into the competition. Features displayed in the demo seems nice but they have to increase more usability in order to capture the market.

The demo code is open-source and you can also play with it.