Good news, everyone! Firefox is officially available for Maemo devices, like the Nokia N900!
What’s that you say? Firefox has been available for Maemo for a while now? Sure, but now it’s official.
Now, that’s not to say that the past releases were “unofficial”; they were just “Release Candidates”, which is sort of a fancy way of saying “really, really late stage Betas that are probably good enough to release”. That means that if you’re already using Firefox Mobile (otherwise known by its codename, “Fennec”), you’re probably not going to notice anything new in this release – but if you were waiting until the development team thought it was ready for public consumption, now’s the time to jump.
Maemo may not be the most obvious choice of platforms to launch on, but it’s one that Mozilla could develop on quickly and without restriction. This release serves as a nice little sneak peak at what to expect as it rolls out to other platforms (such as Android, which I’m hearing should see its first signs of Firefox Mobile in the next month or two).
So what makes Firefox Mobile worthwhile? We’ll let Mozilla do the talking:
- Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching
- Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience
- Add-ons – Customize your Firefox by adding small pieces of functionality, like games and news readers, that help make the mobile Web browser your own
- Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location
- Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next
- Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings
- Available in more than 30 languages and counting
So what do you think? If Firefox for Mobile came to your platform of choice, think you’d make the switch? Let us know in the comments below.