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Firefox Mobile 1.1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox Mobile 1.1 has been released for Maemo devices such as the Nokia N900. Madhava Enros has put together a field guide for Firefox Mobile 1.1 which highlights what's new and notable in this release."
Firefox for J2ME devices should be cool too... At least for trying. I'm currently using Opera Mini and it's great.
Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.
Actually, now that I think about it, I believe that when the MeeGo Notebook UX was released the devs chose Fennec as the browser, so maybe there's not much work left to do there.
Having Firefox on Symbian (e.g. on the next Nokia N8 phone, etc...) would also hitch Firefox to the transition wagon that Nokia is driving to try to get Symbian developers and hardware integrators to eventually move to MeeGo. There could be some benefit to be had there...
coding is life
Firefox was release a few days ago on the N900. The user interface is indeed nice, very intuitive too, however the browser is still quite slow. If you enable flash (through about:config) it hangs the interface for long periods of time, particularly with video playback it stutters constantly - probably flash 10.1 will sort this out whenever they feel like releasing it - my understanding is that this version of flash will have hardware acceleration.
All in all it's nice, I would love to use it as my default browser, though the interface is a little unresponsive at the moment. Chromium suffers the same problem in a way.
I've installed it on my n900, but it's unusably slow, especially compared to MicroB, which is the default browser on Maemo (which also uses the gecko engine). It takes ages to start up, uses up all the CPU, and it takes 5 minutes before you finally managed to load a page. Also, after you close the browser, there's a 'fennec' process still using all the CPU cycles and draining your battery.
Too bad, because I do like its feature set: Firefox sync, addons, etc, but I'll stick to MicroB until they find a solution to the CPU use issue.
A real browser on a real OS on a real phone, no need to beg for permission or risk removal :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.
The real question is why bother to bring out a version for Maemo when Maemo is an evolutionary dead end, that will have no future versions? MeeGo is the replacement for Maemo! Typical Mozilla timing... well behind where it needs to be. I was playing with beta of a mobile firefox on Windows Mobile 2003. It more or less worked. AFAICT all that work was simply discarded in favor of a new project? Would very much like to be told I am wrong with specifics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real question is how did you manage to miss that MeeGo is essentially not a replacement, but rebranding? (and hardware of mobile phones supposedly wasn't there yet, in 2003)
One that hath name thou can not otter
The real question is how did you manage to miss that MeeGo is essentially not a replacement, but rebranding? (and hardware of mobile phones supposedly wasn't there yet, in 2003)
Uh, what? Almost everything is totally different in MeeGo. I mean, it's going from GTK+ to Qt, for starters. Or how about the fact that it's based on Moblin, not on Maemo? I was following the Moblin releases when they suddenly became MeeGo and went from having to not having a GUI on x86.
MeeGo is absolutely a replacement for Maemo. And your Maemo software won't run on it. And Maemo was NEVER fully opened, but MeeGo is supposed to be, and Moblin was.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can develop apps on Qt for Maemo already. MeeGo is not "based on Moblin" to such exclusive extent as you think it to be.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It is unfortunate but I think Mozilla is way too late jumping on this mobile browser bandwagon. People are already way too comfortable and probably aren't going to be switching browsers anytime soon unless new phones come preinstalled with Firefox mobile. And I don't see anybody doing that considering that Apple is sticking with Safari, and the Android is using their own Chrome blend. Frankly it's useless. I've never been an Apple fan, but damn that Safari for the iPod touch and iPhone is probably one of the best I've used.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Wait, what? Firefox runs just fine in its full form on my Eee PC, that's clocked in at somewhat less than 1 GHZ. The only issue I could see is that the full version takes up too much memory for a cell phone and the interface doesn't really work on a screen of that size. But that's the case with all the other browsers except IE, which really doesn't run well on anything that slow.
No, that isn't true. Double-tap is "smart zoom". Use the hardware volume keys to zoom in and out in increments.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The people who have a Maemo device care, of course.
The improvement over MicroB is that it works better for actually buying things on-line. The "save as PDF" option for receipts is a very useful feature. What's needed now is a print driver; discussions I've looked at suggest that this won't come before MeeGo, as there is little point in Nokia developing a CUPS-friendly print solution for an OS that it plans to obsolete.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ditto here, with a single core clocked at 800MHz.
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I got a new N900 yesterday. I like it.
I didn't, however, like the browser. The inability to open new taps was the killer for me, for all its rendering speed.
I used Opera Mini on my 5800, and was pleased that it did tabbed browsing, but it just wasn't that good for form filling. I get a lot of trains, and cannot always be sure of my connections before setting off, so a phone that allows me to search for onwards trains as I'm nearing a stop is what I need. Opera mini did not allow that. With all their stuff being pre-rendered, it was fast, but hitting up thetrainline.com or scotrail.co.uk was useless, as once I'd filled in a form I was unlikely to get any meaningful result.
So I've been using firefox 1.1 since yesterday, and its everything I need. Not blisteringly fast, but it is intuitive, tabbed, and compatible with modern websites with javascript et al. The only challenge was finding out how to make it my default browser, but, as they say in apple parlance, "there's an app for that", so it was righted in short order.
Also, while opera mini looked good on the 5800, on the N900 it looks terrible - the border menus are ungainly and look poor.
If you are getting nightly builds of Firefox mobile, there is nothing new here. I got excited about a new release, only to find out, I've been on this new release for months now.
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/versions/
Unless your WinMo phone has very little RAM (less than 50MB free on bootup), you should be a be able to run Opera Mobile. They offer it for free now on their site.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I can't wait for a mobile browser (running in android) that uses addons... specifically adblock.
Which pisses me off as I want to use those keys to change the volume (but this isn't just Firefox doing this, MicroB and the photo viewer use them as zoom buttons too).
I wish Mozilla implemented the swirl thing for the n900, though, but maybe Nokia patented it or something.
Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.
The real question is why bother to bring out a version for Maemo when Maemo is an evolutionary dead end, that will have no future versions? MeeGo is the replacement for Maemo! Typical Mozilla timing... well behind where it needs to be.
99% of Firefox Mobile development is platform-agnostic. You can flip a switch at compile time and it builds against GTK or Qt, and/or on Maemo/Meego or Android.
The only 'focus' on Maemo might be that there is a current userbase there, so it's cool to have official updates for them.
Note: I am on the FIrefox Mobile development team.
MeeGo for Handsets is actually based heavily on Maemo. From our point of view at least, it's an incremental change rather than a complete replacement. Firefox for MeeGo will be an evolution of Firefox for Maemo. Of course, it helps that the bulk of Firefox code is already platform- and toolkit-agnostic - for example, we already have Qt builds for Maemo 5.
the bulk of Firefox code is already platform- and toolkit-agnostic - for example, we already have Qt builds for Maemo 5.
Nice. Now we just need a qt firefox for my KDE desktop.
It has Flash, it's just disabled by default.
There is a port of Chromium to N900. Download here: http://jacekowski.org/