Spanish Geeksphone and Mozilla presented the first Firefox OS cell phones that are expected to become available next February.

Two models have been presented.

FirefoxOS on Keon

The Keon, is the entry level model, and features:

• CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 1Ghz
• UMTS 2100/1900/900 (3G HSPA)
• GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (2G EDGE)
• Screen 3.5″ HVGA Multitouch
• 3 MP Camera
• 4GB ROM, 512 MB RAM
• MicroSD, Wifi N, Light and proxmity Sensor, G-Sensor, GPS, MicroUSB
• 1580 mAh battery
• Over the air updates
• Unlocked, add your own SIM card

And Peak, the higher end phone:

• CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2Ghz x2.
  UMTS 2100/1900/900 (3G HSPA).
  GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (2G EDGE).
  Screen 4.3″ qHD IPS Multitouch.
  Camera 8 MP (back) + 2 MP (front).
  4 GB (ROM) and 512 (RAM).
  MicroSD, Wifi N, Light and proxmity Sensor, G-Sensor, GPS, MicroUSB, Flash (camera).
  Battery 1800 mAh.

While Firefox OS has reached 1.0 status just today, these phones are aimed to developers and not end users, so it will definitely differ from the final version.

In the past, Geeksphone has offered Android phones like its Zero model, but it now looks completely focused on releasing the Firefox OS phones.

More details to come as the phones become available in February.

If you have always felt like Firefox’s Private mode was lacking something, probably it was a way of browsing in private mode some pages while keeping your regular, non private ones open at the same time.

The time is coming as Firefox nightlies (Firefox 20) now feature private windows where you can browse with confidence that no history, passwords or forms will be kept after you close a private window.

Instead of Private mode, the Firefox menu features a New Private Window item that does precisely that.

Now you can have private and non private windows side by side, and more importantly, you don’t have to close your current session to browse some other pages. 

An option to open a link in a new private window is also available from links’ context menu.

Private windows won’t be available in final form until April next year according to Firefox’s release channels update plans, but daredevils’ can get it from Firefox Nightlies web page today.

Google updated its favicon recently and of course it is coming to Firefox in a future release. But if you don’t want to wait  for the fix, here’s a tip to keep up with the times.

1. Download this updated version of the Google search plugin. (Only change is the updated data: url for the favicon)
2. Copy it to your searchplugins folder in your Firefox install folder  (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ on Windows), and overwrite the existing google.xml file.
3. Restart Firefox.

Enjoy!

Oleg Romashin, a Nokia principal engineer, has released a video showing Firefox OS running on Raspberry Pi, the $25 credit card size single board computer, which debuted earlier this year.

As you can see in the video, the Gecko runtime is shown running with even some WebGL animations running at smooth 60 fps (frames per second).

While this is an experimental project, it definitely gives an idea on the kind performance Firefox OS can deliver on an ARM11 processor like the Raspeberry Pi’s.

A new Firefox update is now available for download featuring a few UI improvements, web development features, and important security fixes.

First thing you may notice is something missing: the site button no longer features a favicon for security concerns: it helps malicious sites spoof some other site’s identity. By removing it, Firefox developers expect users to focus on the meaning of the new icons. Also, as it was redundant with the tab icon,

For regular sites, you get a generic gray world icon.

Sites offering encrypted communication are presented with a gray lock icon. (more…)