Mozilla developers are working to bring Firefox to Ouya

The Android-powered Ouya console has been making headlines for months as one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns to date. Early units are already finding new homes with game developers ahead of a planned launch in April but it’s what a particular browser maker is doing with the console that’s the topic of today’s headlines.

According to a post from Ed Krassenstein, an Ouyaforum.com administrator, Mozilla reached out to him yesterday with regards to building a version of the browser for the console. Specifically, Mozilla’s Chris Lord asked what they needed to do to make Firefox usable on Ouya. He said the program already works and they have done some preliminary patches for gamepad support but there’s still a lot of work to be done to make it usable.

Lord noted that part of the work that still remains will be getting WebGL, Canvas and relevant APIs (such as Gamepad API) working with the browser. It seems that the toughest aspect of getting it all ironed out is figuring out the non-standard control scheme. Of course it is good news for consumers that Mozilla is already hard at work on the project some three months before the console is scheduled to hit the market.

The Mozilla mobile platform engineer even tweeted an image of a Firefox build running on an early Ouya console. He further revealed that at least one other developer, Kartikaya Gupta, is also working on the project.