Christian Sejersen, who heads the engineering department for mobiles at Mozilla, has some good news for Symbian fans around the world. He has confirmed that Mozilla is working on a version of the Fennec for Symbian devices.

This comes after Mozilla had earlier scrapped plans to introduce the Fennec for other popular smart phone platforms, namely Android and the OSX (iPhone), citing licensing and technological reasons. Currently, Fennec is available only for Linux "Maemo," with the Nokia N-series Internet tablet. A Windows Mobile version is also in the works, which we had previewed earlier.

According to a recent blog post by Sejersen, the reason for Mozilla's interest in Symbian is purely because of the vast market share the platform commands. To put things into perspective, in Q2 2008, Symbian-based devices accounted for as much as 57% of all smartphones sold; compare this with 11% for Windows Mobile and 7.2% for Linux, and it's clear why Symbian is such an attractive proposition for Mozilla.

On its part, Symbian too has committed a team of developers who will work on developing the first builds of the Fennec for Symbian. The way things are going, we can expect the alpha build version of the Fennec by mid-2009.

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