Earlier on last year Mozilla detailed some of their plans for the mobile platforms. Under the Firefox umbrella Mozilla is to create a mobile sibling powered by Gecko. This week their wiki was updated with the first mock-ups of the interface for Firefox Mobile, for both touch and non-touch screen devices.

Besides working on mobile devices Firefox Mobile will offer the Gecko engine for the first time on something less powerful, but more widely spread, namely mobile (smart-) phones. Just like the desktop version Firefox Mobile will offer the user the ability to extend basic functionality (which comes close to Opera Mini) with add-ons (or more commonly called extensions).

Looking at the first mock-ups for touch screen devices you'll see some familiar controls. First of all Firefox Mobile with use tabs, thus you can have more than one page open. Firefox Mobile may sport a progress bar similar to safari, which is embedded inside the URL bar.

The non-touch screen version looks more similar to Opera Mini. Mapped to the secondary button is a context menu which allows the user to access bookmarks, history, tabs and typing an address. However unlike Opera Mini it won't rely on a server to pre-render pages, but use its own Gecko engine.

Judging from the mock-ups Mozilla is looking at two of its main competitors, Safari on the iPhone/iPod touch, and Opera Mini (and Mobile). Whether Mozilla is able to catch up on the competition will remain a mystery until the real deal is available, but you probably won't run it on your plain Java enabled mobile phone.