Mozilla might not be bringing their Firefox Mobile web browser to the iPhone, but they’d done the next best thing with the Firefox Home for iPhone app. Launched just a few days ago, the simple app basically connects to the Firefox Sync service to find out what active tabs, bookmarks, and browsing history you have on your desktop Firefox browser and gathers them in one single place on your Apple smartphone. It sounds simple enough, but the actual app itself is good enough to warrant a video walkthrough (in full 1080p HD, no less).
First, what is this “Sync” service? Well, it’s a plugin for Firefox web browsers that allows you to save your active tabs, bookmarks, passwords and browsing history to the cloud. That means you can start browsing websites on your desktop, and when you leave, you can still continue your browsing session through any computer with a Sync-enabled browser. The only problem with doing that on the iPhone is that Apple will not allow Firefox Mobile’s non-webkit rendering engine into the iTunes AppStore. Apple wants only webkit-based browsers into the AppStore, and a webkit-based Mozilla browser is almost blasphemous. So, Mozilla has gone and released the most compelling feature of Firefox Mobile in a separate iPhone app.
The video here should demonstrate how Firefox Home app brings your desktop browsing experience to your iPhone. We start off by showing the active tabs on the desktop Firefox browser. Then we synchronize the “Sync” Firefox plugin (you’ll have to install the plugin, just so you know). After that, it’s a simple matter of hitting the app icon on the smartphone and you’re taken to a list of tabs, bookmarks and browsing history. Clicking on any of the items in the list opens up a webpage within the app (using the iPhone Safari browser API, of course).