Take a tour of the first version of Firefox on the Nokia N900

Take a quick tour of the first version of Firefox on the Nokia N900. Fore more info, visit Firefox.com/mobile. To download Firefox directly to your Nokia N900, visit Firefox.com/m

Firefox for the Nokia N900 is released to the world!

Firefox for the Nokia N900 is now available. Go to Firefox.com/m on your Nokia N900 to download.

Today marks a very important day for Mozilla. Bringing Firefox to mobile devices is the next step towards fulfilling Mozilla’s mission of providing one Web that everyone can  access, regardless of device or location.

Secure, powerful and customizable, Firefox is the most modern mobile Web browser available and is optimized for an exceptional mobile experience. These key design principles are at the heart of the browsing experience: minimize typing, let the Web have center stage, and seamlessly synchronize your desktop and mobile browsing, to name a few. Learn more about your favorite Firefox features now available for mobile.

Thanks for all of support, feedback and hard work to make this day possible.

Announcing Firefox for Maemo Release Candidate 3!

We’re excited to bring you the third release candidate of Firefox for Maemo!

For our third release candidate, we put a lot of emphasis on improving overall performance: Web pages load significantly faster than RC2. Panning is more responsive and zooming in on Web pages is much faster. The Awesome Bar will now pop up much faster when you tap on it.

Since RC2, we have also recommended a couple more add-ons. Go to the Add-ons Manager to discover and install add-ons directly from your Nokia N900. Along with Weave Sync (that synchronizes your Firefox history, bookmarks, open tabs and saved passwords between your desktop and mobile), you’ll find add-ons that support user productivity and product performance.

One change we’ve made is to disable plugin support for this release.  We have continued to find that the Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.  If you wish to enable our experimental plugin support, you will be able to manually via about:config, but do so at your own risk.  Some sites like YouTube do work well, and we’re working on a browser add-on that will allow users to choose which sites to enable plugins for.

To download Firefox to your Nokia N900, go to Firefox.com/m on your N900’s default browser and download. If you’ve already got RC2 installed on your N900, you will be receiving a software update shortly.  If you do not have a Nokia N900 but wish to download Firefox for Maemo to your desktop to test, provide feedback, or build add-ons, please do so. That said, the desktop versions are intended for development purposes only.

• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Linux

RC3 feels swift and responsive while looking slick. I know I’m not supposed to be the most objective reviewer, but I am a mobile user and I keep finding myself saying “Thank God for the Awesome Bar” when I browse.  Opening new tabs, switching to from tab-to-tab, and syncing my open tabs with my desktop Firefox is fast and just one touch away!  I have been really amused and delighted by some of the new add-ons that I’ve tried. They consider both the mobile context and the device capabilities and they really come in handy. Firefox provides a platform for creating great mobile applications by using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, and I am simply ecstatic to see more new innovations.

Hot Shots

Behind the scenes of behind the scenes! Last week we took the Nokia N900 for a photo shoot! Take a look.

Firefox mobile photo shoot with the Nokia N900

Mobile Add-on Categories

As you probably know by now, Firefox is the first Web browser to support mobile add-ons. This feature has already proved super handy. Get it? Handy? I’ve been trying a lot of new mobile add-ons — getting sports and news feeds to my phone,  checking out rapid scrolling of a page,  seeing my favorite Web sites sans ads and checking out events in my area with geo guides, to name a few.  Keep the mobile innovations coming because they’re super, super useful for life away from the desktop.

Due to all the great new add-ons being created for mobile, we recently set up categories so they’re more discoverable. Go to the Firefox mobile add-ons page and check them out on the top-left corner of the page.  Add-on developers: please categorize your add-ons, or re-categorize your existing add-ons so that users may find them more easily.

I can’t wait to see what developers will think of next, like add-ons that take advantage of my device’s features, or my love for window shopping, or my obsession for Wes Welker, or my need for speed…oh my!

Happy Customizing,

Caitlin

Firefox for Maemo RC1 released!

Mozilla has released the first release candidate of Firefox for Maemo. Happy New Year! Read more: http://bit.ly/7u8u1t

Read the Release Notes!

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.

We’re looking to get all the feedback we can as we move forward, so please send feedback or file bugs.

Congrats Mobile Add-on Challenge Winners

We’ve seen some fantastic, new mobile add-on submissions over the past few weeks and months. Many new mobile add-ons for Firefox consider the capabilities and attributes of the mobile device, utilizing geolocation, screen size and mobile usability best practices, to name a few.

After reviewing a multitude of submissions and much debate around many worthy contenders, the judges from the AMO and Mobile teams have chosen ten (10) of the “best” (innovative, useful, compatible) Firefox mobile add-ons. We’re very pleased to announce our winners (and thrilled to start using their add-ons soon) and award them each with a brand new Nokia N900.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our first Mobile Add-on Challenge!

Our ten Challenge Winners are as follows:

• AutoPager by Wind Li
  AutoPager automatically loads the next page of a site inline when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content. It includes an adblock-type feature to allow you filter out the ads from the contents in the loaded page contents. By default, AutoPager works with a ton of sites, including Lifehacker, the New York Times, Digg, Google, etc.
• Flux by Marcio Galli
  Flux lets you take a screen shot a of Web page, draw on top of it, and save it to a local device or upload it to flickr. Check the demo of usage here.

• Geoguide by Fabice Desre
  Geoguide uses the geolocation service to provide localized information : map, pictures, weather, events and wikipedia entries.
• Hold4Tab by Almog B
  With Hold4Tab you can open a hyperlink in a new tab. Just press on the link for a second and a half and the link will be opened as a new tab.
• Lazy Click by Tamas Marki
  Lazy Click fixes missed clicks by applying them to the closest clickable object (link, button). This is especially useful on touchscreen displays, where it can be challenging to hit a smaller link or button with your finger.
• Mobilize by Attila Csipa
  Mobilize allows you to switch to mobile versions of sites. Is the Internet slow, are you in a weak-signal area? Is a site ‘too much’ for your device? Mobilize employs two strategies to find mobile versions of sites: 1. Use a predefined set of rules for sites that have special URL schemes (like facebook, amazon, google, wikipedia, slashdot, etc). 2. If no rule was found, apply some common naming schemes (like m. or mobile. prefix in domain name). Sites that fall into this group are engadget, digg, reddit and many more. This way a Firefox mobile user can switch to a mobile site without fiddling with the URL.
• NearMe, by Richard Klein
  Near Me helps you locate businesses in your vicinity by using your geolocation and running a local search. Near Me comes with several preset searches along with the ability to search for any other local item.
• Fastest Scroll in the West by Enrico Previdi
  This add-on solves a usability problem for the navigation in long or large pages on mobile phones. When you are on a long page, you can click the button on the left sidebar to activate a fast scroll. This is useful with big images as well.
• TwitterBar by Chris Finke
  TwitterBar allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small Twitter icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left. You can also post by typing “–post” at the end of your tweet. Clicking the Twitter icon when visiting a Web page will send a tweet containing the URL of the Web page you are currently viewing.
• Yummy by Nicolas Martin
  Add Feed support (RSS, Atom,…). Feed Viewer, Feed discovery in the visited pages, possibilities to subscribe to them as Live Bookmarks, and visualize updated Feed in your Bookmarks (bold) and their number.

Take Five with HTML5: SVG & Canvas

Ah yes, the wonderful world of HTML5. Check out Arun Ranganathan demoing svg and canvas on the Nokia N900.

Take Five with HTML5: Device Orientation & Geolocation on the Nokia N900

Doug Turner demos device orientation and geolocation on the Nokia N900.

Check out WebGL on Nokia’s N900

Vladimir Vukicevic, principal engineer, Firefox, shows us a couple of WebGL demos on the Nokia N900. Read more about it and check out comments on HACKS.MOZILLA.ORG