Mozilla announced that Firefox is now available for Nokia’s Maemo platform. The browser is intended and optimized for use on the Nokia N900. It can also be run on the Nokia N810 and N800 Internet Tablets, but Mozilla don’t recommend using its product on these devices because they are "significantly less powerful.”
Firefox for Maemo is built on the same engine as Firefox 3.6 for desktop (Gecko 1.9.2) with some extensive under the hood work to optimize for mobile. It includes the new “TraceMonkey” JavaScript engine, an advanced JIT (“just in time”) compiler using tracing technology.
New Mozilla’s mobile browser comes with Weave Sync that enables to sync tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords with desktop Firefox, Location-Aware Browsing, which gives you maps and information relevant to your location, offline browsing and one-touch bookmarking.
It’s the first mobile browser with add-ons support. There are currently more than 40 Firefox add-ons available for mobile, like popular AdBlock Plus, URL Fixer, TwitterBar, language translators, and geo guides, to name a few.
Initially, Firefox for N900 does not support browser plug-ins. “Due to performance problems using Adobe Flash within Firefox on many websites, especially those with multiple plug-ins on them, we have disabled plugins for Firefox for Maemo 1.0.,” states Mozilla.
“We plan to provide a browser add-on that will enable you to selectively enable plugins on certain sites, because some sites, like YouTube, work well.”
Mozilla is also working on a mobile version of its browser for other platforms. Firefox for the Windows Mobile is in Alpha (yet optimized for Samsung Omnia II, AT&T Touch Fuze, HTC Touch Pro), the company is currently investigating development for Android.
They do not have plans to build Firefox for iPhone – due to “constraints with the OS environment and distribution”, Blackberry – due to “its Java-based operating system and the inability to build native components”, and Symbian.
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