Mozilla Unveils ‘Firefox for Maemo’ Release Candidate

Users of the Nokia N900 can now try out a Firefox browser on their handset after Mozilla released the first release candidate of Firefox for Maemo.

In a 31 December, 2009 blog post, Stuart Parmenter, director of mobile at Mozilla, said, “We’ve improved text rendering, added new hooks for add-on developers, and continued to polish the application. We’ve addressed many N900 specific issues, including installing to /opt and the fixing the symbol picker.”

Maemo is a software platform developed by Nokia for smartphones and Internet tablets and is based on the Debian Linux distribution. The platform comprises the Maemo operating system and the Maemo SDK.

RC1 of Firefox for Maemo is built on the same browser engine as Firefox 3.6 for the desktop, and delivers familiar Firefox features such as the Awesome Bar, Add-ons, Weave Sync and Location-Aware Browsing, according to the Firefox for Mobile 1.0 Release Candidate release notes.

Firefox for Maemo is available for download on the Nokia N900 and the software is initially available in more than 15 languages.

According to the Firefox for Mobile 1.0 release notes, the new release candidate includes among other things:

• Awesome Bar: The Smart Location Bar, or “Awesome Bar” is even more awesome on a mobile device. The Awesome Bar gets you to your web destination with minimal typing, by intelligently searching the names, URLs and tags of the sites you visit, and takes into account how often and recently you visit them. With Weave Sync, the Awesome Bar will also search the web history from Firefox on your PC.
• Easy access to many search engines: Type your search term right in the Awesome Bar to search Google. Or send your search to another search engine (Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Twitter) with one touch. Customise with the search engines of your choice.