Mozilla has been steadily moving towards its goal of releasing the first Firefox browser for mobile phones and, on Friday 29th January, released Firefox 1.0 for Nokia’s Maemo – previously code-named Fennec.
Firefox for the Maemo 5 platform has a few things that set it apart from other mobile browsers, in particular its third-party, customisable, browser extensions. Here’s the rest of the goodies from Mozilla’s blog:
- Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching.
- Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience.
- Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location.
- Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next.
- Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings.
- Available in more than 30 languages and counting.
Add-ons helped make Firefox the top browser alternative to Internet Explorer in the desktop space. To punctuate the importance of add-ons for Firefox’s mobile browser, Mozilla also released on Friday the general release of its bookmark and history-syncing extension, Weave Sync 1.0, for both desktop and mobile.
Nokia’s open-source, Linux-based Maemo operating system supports mobile Firefox on just two devices: the N900 and the N810, which is an internet tablet.
A last-minute decision to pull wholesale support for Adobe’s Flash plug-in from this latest build will cause problems for users who want to watch videos or view Web sites that rely heavily on Flash content.
As a workaround, Mozilla has released an add-on called YouTube enabler, that early adopters can install to view YouTube videos.
Mozilla is hoping to work out other solutions for those who are wary of optionally installing the Flash plug-in, but still want to see select Flash-based content.
You can download Firefox 1.0 for Maemo here, and read more details in Mozilla’s blog post.
Source: CNET
