Mozilla has released Firefox for Maemo in its final form, bringing Firefox to mobile devices for the first time. It is Firefox: you get the awesome bar, a download manager where you can pause and resume downloads, one touch bookmarking and tagging, tabbed browsing, the site button for quick security checks, popup blocker, a password manager, the same rendering engine (HTML5, native Theora video, embedded fonts), spell checker, etc.
What makes Firefox for Maemo a product on its own is the efficient user interface designed from the ground up to take challenges like having no keyboard, less computing power, or a smaller display while taking advantage of tablets’ touch screens, and handling.
Mozilla is starting the year in great shape releasing the first release candidate of Firefox mobile for Maemo devices like Nokia Internet tablet devices, just hours before 2009 came to an end.
Feature wise, it is Firefox. You get the awesome bar, a download manager where you can pause and resume downloads, one touch bookmarking and tagging, tabbed browsing, the site button for quick security checks, popup blocker, a password manager, the same rendering engine (HTML5, native Theora video, embedded fonts), spell checker, etc.
What makes Firefox for Maemo a product on its own is the efficient user interface designed from the ground up to take challenges like having no keyboard, less computing power, or a smaller display while taking advantage of tablets’ touch screens, and handling.
Mozilla has released new development releases for two of its supported platforms: Beta 2 for Nokia Internet Tablets (powered by Maemo), and Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile.
As noted in Stuart Parmenter’s blos post, these new releases feature a new theme that improves usability, better performance and reliability, and work has started to make web forms easier to use.
Mozilla has released the first public milestone of Fennec (mobile Firefox) for Windows Mobile devices.
Featuring a user interface and overall behavior similar to the more developed version for Nokia tablets (running Maemo OS), it is still an alpha and is not recommended for day to day use.
The video below, prepared by Madhava Enros, provides a nice overview of how it behaves on an HTC Touch.
Mozilla has released the second development release of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox for Nokia Internet Tablets (running on maemo, a mobile Linux platform).
As with the previous alpha, this release is also available as a XULRunner application which allows it to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.
As Firefox Mobile, code named Fennec, approaches its second alpha (due this week), Mozilla’s Christian Sejersen announced today that Mozilla will port Fennec to S60, Nokia’s Symbian-based mobile platform, and the most popular overall, currently commanding about half the total installed base, effectively quadrupling the number of potential users for Mozilla’s mobile web browser.
Together with the other supported platforms, Windows Mobile and Maemo (Linux for Nokia Internet Tablets), Mozilla will reach about 65% of the mobile market.
Development for S60 is already under way with some of the building blocks like Gecko, the JavaScript engine, and HTML parser already completed and ready for the next steps that include Necko (Mozilla’s networking engine) to get a functional versions by the end of March next year.
Firefox Mobile (codename Fennec) development builds will now sport its own cool logo based on the plain globe icon of unbranded Firefox builds with a large fennec fox head overlaid. A fennec fox is a small large-eared Saharian fox and, according to te Wikipedia, the only fox species that can be kept as a pet though not domesticated.
Aza Raskin, one of the human interface experts hired last year by Mozilla, has released a five minutes video of a very early prototype of what Firefox Mobile’s interface may look like.
As you can see in the video below, the design aims to overcome two of the most common limitations in mobile devices: a small screen that translates into small user interface elements and a small content window, and a handicapped user experience compared to desktop browsers.
In a post to Mozilla Security blog, Window Snyder, Mozilla Security Officer, confirmed a security threat reported a couple of days ago that has compromised Vietnamese language packs downloaded since February 18, 2008.
Apparentlly, the language pack author’s computer got infected with the HTML.Xorer virus which injected malicious scripts into Firefox’s localized help files to display unwanted ads. While not harmful at this point, the ads could be replaced with malware to compromise users’ computers.
A second take on Mobile Firefox UI’s design for touchscreen devices has been published. The new design picks suggestions made to the previous proposal and introduces a more subtle user interface that makes better use of portable devices’ limited screen estate.
Mozilla is starting the year in great shape releasing the first release candidate of Firefox mobile for Maemo devices like Nokia Internet tablet devices, just hours before 2009 came to an end.
As Firefox Mobile, code named Fennec, approaches its second alpha (due this week), Mozilla’s Christian Sejersen 