Video: Mozilla Firefox for Maemo Beta 4 running on a Nokia N900
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 PM PST In Applications, Linux, Nokia
Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Mobile at Mozilla, runs through Firefox for Maemo on the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900 in the video below and shows off how tabs work, the “awesome bar”, and extensions. You may be asking yourself what’s the point of Mozilla building Firefox for Mobile? WebKit has the largest share of the mobile browser space, and they’re doing a damn fine job at what they do, but you have to remember that WebKit isn’t a browser, it’s just a rendering engine. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), RIM, they’re all building browsers that are powered by WebKit, whereas Mozilla is actually building a complete browser that you as a consumer can install on your mobile device similar to how you install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows today. Key difference. No clue as to when Firefox Mobile will be finished, and what platforms it will support, but at least you can sleep soundly at night knowing that there is a company fighting to make the internet a better experience regardless of the device you use.
[Hat tip to @luovanto aka Jussi Mäkinen, Marketing Maemo Devices @ Nokia]
At the end of the day what it really matters is rendering speed and the perception of UI responsiveness
It’s simply untrue that FF on N900 is the first browser on a mobile device with the capability of using add-ons. Check out Netscape plug-in API for Nokia (Symbian) devices at http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/browser_plug-in_api.html. The API has been available since 2004 and enables add-ons to run within the context of the browser.
Not as if the demo hadn’t been attractive, I just wanted to correct this “mistake” that Mr Sullivan made.