Firefox has finally made its way to the iPhone, after announcing the app in May. Since Apple’s not too keen on letting through apps that duplicate its own products, the Firefox iPhone app is quite limited. It works in tandem with the Safari browser, letting you access your Firefox bookmarks, desktop browsing history and tabs. From PCWorld,

“The rendering capabilities of the two engines are similar enough that, in most cases, users will not be able to tell the difference. The same cannot be said of plug-ins, which have long set Firefox apart in the world of Web browsers and will not be available at all in Home.”

So it turns out the app is more of a Safari workaround, but it’s an important step for Firefox. Expanding its mobile reach is another necessary step, with mobile web browsing becoming increasingly important for consumers in nearly every smart phone demographic. According Millennial Media’s MobileMix report, ads served to mobile web browsers have increased in the U.S. by 50% since April, indicating the rise in mobile web usage (we covered it here for more details).

The fact that Apple is still the preferred platform for development, Firefox could benefit a great deal from being able to grow its iOS presence, as difficult as that may be. The browser has already been made available on Android, which is seeing significant competition from the browser space. Opera has been quite active on the Android platform, with its latest release just this week.

Beyond mobile devices, the browser wars have steamed up again this year. Firefox is beginning to see encroachment from Google’s Chrome browser, though its recent win over IE as the default browser for IBM has taken Firefox deeper into the enterprise realm.

But to relate this back to mobile browsing, the battle between Mozilla and Google will continue to play out in this arena. This is where Google has precedence similar to Apple, with the home-field advantage of Chrome on Android. While Google is open-source and less dictating with apps running on Android, the consumer appeal could very well be nudged in Google’s direction, thanks to default integration and access.