A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the latest Release Candidate 2 of Firefox Mobile for Nokia N900 owners and installed it on my N900. It was faster than the previous version, that was very slow and unusable, but I did not use it that often. On 28 January, Mozilla released Firefox for Nokia N900 v.1.0 so I just downloaded it this morning.
As mentioned in the recent RC3 update post, Flash support was pulled out of the Firefox browser to improve performance.We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. 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. We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plugins for, as some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well.
While Flash support is no longer supported in the final release, add-ons are quite compelling and there is one for YouTube called YouTube enabler. As stated above, you do still have the option to enable the Flash plugin if you desire and you can still get Flash support in the default microB browser loaded on the N900 if you want to visit Flash-based sites. Other than YouTube, Flash is really not much of a concern for me so I now plan to use the N900 as my primary browser on the N900.
As stated on the Mozilla site, these are the features of the Firefox browser:
* 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
Visit firefox.com/mobile in your N900 web browser to install the latest version.
There are currently over 40 Firefox mobile add-ons for the N900 and I personally have the following loaded on my device:
- Weave
- TwitterBar
- Lazy Click
- URL Fixer
- Hold4Tab
- YouTube Enabler
- Google integrated search
- Amazon integrated search
- Twitter integrated search
- Wikipedia integrated search
