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Firefox Mobile Reaches 1.0
Majix writes "Firefox Mobile, the mobile browser developed by Mozilla based on the same engine as in the recently released Firefox 3.6, has finally hit version 1.0. The first device to be officially supported is the Nokia N900. With a long list of features, Firefox Mobile looks to be the most complete mobile browser to date. Highlights include the familiar Awesome Bar, Weave Sync for sharing your browser state between your PC and mobile, and of course tabbed browsing and Firefox add-ons. With the Nokia 900 and Firefox Mobile 1.0, even Flash content including the normal YouTube site is working, showing that a mobile browser does not have to equal a compromised Internet experience."
"We do not have plans to build an iPhone browser due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution. "
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms
"Firefox Mobile looks to be the most complete mobile browser to date."
Perhaps if you ignore Opera, Safari and Netfront.. Otherwise, from what I have seen, it mostly sucks pretty bad...
...the N900 is an amazing platform. I know it from a computational photography class at my university: http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448a-10/ It runs a full Linux distro, has a 5MP camera, and now with FF 1.0 I consider it the first phone with a real browser. (IPhone/ITouch/IPad doesn't count because there's no flash and they don't support any browser extensions. Once I can run Flash, Firebug, and Adblock, then it's real.)
I think it deserves a shoutout especially because
*) Nokia is truly awful at promoting their products
*) a certain company that's great at marketing is making all sorts of splash with the antithesis of this phone. it's called the iPad; it runs a Unix derivative, but is an affront to the Unix philosophy. it somehow manages to be three times the size of an N900 with a tenth the functionality.
I think that N900 + FF Mobile is a real tool in an ocean of toys.
Not just one device, it is Firefox Maemo 1.0. Which means it can run any Nokia running Meamo 5.0. There are other versions which are in various stages of development. For eg, its in Alpha 3 for Windows Mobile 6.0.
Check https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms for more info
The UI felt a bit unusual at the start, but I actually ended up liking it, felt unique and effective. The application start time is a few seconds slower than the Micro browser that ships with the N900, but page load and rendering speed seems toughly equal. The straightforwardness of installing and configuring AdBlocker felt more integrated and polished in the new Firefox 1.0. However, the Firefox has a major deal-breaker for me, it's broken ZOOM function. You're only limited to a "maximum zoom in" or "maximum zoom out" by doubletapping the screen, you can't pick your desired level of zoom by doing a clockwise/counterclockwise drag movement like in Micro. Ctrl-UP and Ctrl-DOWN were supposed keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out, but these didn't even work at all, the key combinations did nothing (while other shortcuts like Ctrl-L worked normally). This definately feels like a good start, but it's more of a 0.98 version than a 1.0, it just has a few rough edges and needs some polish.
Actually, it is worse. They support the one and only mobile phone which does not need it. ... not another browser.)
The N900 already has an excellent mozilla-based web browser in MicroB. Fennec is very slow in comparison, and unlike to get much acceptance in it's current form.
(what the n900 needs is a half-decent maps program, or a better mail client, or jave-ME,