firefox

CloudFox brings your Firefox Weave to your Windows Phone

August 22, 2011 | By Surur

Cloud Fox is a free open source Windows Phone 7 application that allows you to wireless synchronize your Firefox Weave bookmarks, history items and open tabs to your mobile phone. This makes all the bookmarks, history items and open tabs of the user his Firefox instantly available on its mobile phone. It is similar to Firefox Home for the iPhone platform.

The application is developed in C# and is currently targeting phones running NoDo; future versions will require Mango. The development of the app can be followed at Codeplex here.

The app is free and can be downloaded from Marketplace here.

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Mozilla :”We’re not looking to bringing Firefox itself to Windows Phone 7 at this point.”

April 2, 2011 | By Surur

firefox-home While everyone else is trying to be everywhere all the time, Mozilla at present does not think they need a Windows phone 7 presence.

During an interview with Softonic, Jay Sullivan, VP of Products at Mozilla Corporation said they were not a present thinking of Windows Phone 7.

Jay said:

At the moment we are focusing on Android in terms of the browser. For those other platforms we may do things like Firefox Home, so you can fire up any browser and get to your Firefox data. We’re not looking to bringing Firefox itself to Windows Phone 7 at this point.

While we understand the difficulty in getting an alternate rendering engine on Windows Phone 7 it is a bit disappointing not to see any commitment to bringing a FireFox Home-type app to Windows phone 7, which should generally be very simple to develop and support their brand on Windows Phone 7 also.

Is Firefox adding Bing as a default search engine?

October 6, 2010 | By Surur

Tonight, Robert Scoble tweeted a single sourced rumor that Mozilla is announcing that Bing will be added as a default search engine in Firefox, as early as tomorrow (Wed Oct. 5). To add some credence to the rumor, on Sept 29 Asa Dotzler of Mozilla posted a “we’re getting closer” screenshot of Firefox 4:

…interesting choice of screenshot material (via @rawmeet)

Scoble clarified in subsequent tweets that according to his source Bing would not be replacing Google, but added as a default search engine choice. We should know more soon, and Google (in a highly paid placement), and Yahoo! are already on the default search engine list, so adding Bing makes sense and is, as Danny Sullivan tweeted, likely overdue.

Still it’s another feather in the cap for Bing, which continues to gain legitimacy, if not market share.

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FireFox weave released, syncs your browser sessions between your desktop and smartphone

June 29, 2009 | By Surur

Weave Sync 0.4 has just been released by Mozilla labs and now supports the new Fennec Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. Weave Sync lets you take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs. For example:

Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers, so you can get to your favourite sites with just a few keystrokes
Continue what you were doing: have the ability to open any tab you have open on any of your Firefox browsers
Keep the same list of bookmarks on all of your Firefox browsers
Easily sign in to all your favourite sites using your saved passwords (this is especially handy on mobile phones, where it’s hard to type in complex passwords)
Do it all securely: Weave Sync encrypts user data before uploading it to Mozilla’s servers, so that only you can access your data

Weave 0.4 brings:

Preference syncing (including Personas)
Identity support (automatic login, including use of OpenID logins)
Better support for addons using Weave
Support for Fennec 1.0 beta 2.
Significant improvements in performance during startup and opening new windows.

Weave 0.4 can for Firefox 3.5 (the only supported desktop version) can be downloaded from here.

Via LifeHacker.com

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Interview confirms no Firefox Mobile for iPhone, Android

October 16, 2008 | By Surur

A Silicon Republic interview with Christian Sejersen, mobile director of engineering on Mozilla confirms that there will be no Firefox Mobile for the Android or Mobile OSX platform.

Regarding the two platforms, about Android he said Mozilla is doing nothing right now or in the near future. As for the iPhone, it is a complete no for two reasons: firstly the fact that developers cannot create an application that replicates the functionality of a pre-existing Apple one, and secondly because Apple also does not allow apps that run any code in the background because of the way the licence terms are written.

Sejersen said that Mozilla is initially targeting the N810, which is Linux-based and has open access to APIs and the OS , but also has a large touch screen as its development platform. An alpha version expected sometime this week.

Further down the line, Firefox Mobile will be made available for both touch and non-touch versions of Windows Mobile. After that, Sejersen said that although Mozilla hasn’t made a commitment as of yet, the Symbian phone will most likely follow.

The beta version of Firefox Mobile will be released before the year is out and is expected to come out of beta testing some time in 2009.

In October 2007, Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice-president of engineering said that mobile devices had become a top priority for the organisation behind the popular open source browser, Firefox.

“What we have said before is that Firefox Mobile will be afforded the same first-class citizen status as the desktop version, and not one version behind like most other web browser developers do,” explained Sejersen.

Firefox Mobile developer asking for help

October 3, 2008 | By Surur

Brad Lassey, the developer of my favourite up and coming alternate browser, is asking for a bit of advice regarding the Windows Mobile Emulator:

I want to run a debug build of fennec on my windows mobile emulator. I have been able to do this by “mounting” my object directory as a shared folder. Unfortunately I’m seeing IO errors which I’ve read could be due to the way the emulator maps in the “storage card.”

So now I’m trying to deploy fennec and xulrunner to the Program Files folder through visual studio. Unfortunately the emulator images provided by microsoft only have 10-20mb (depending on how you launch them) of free storage space, so the deploy fails.

I’m hoping some one out there has a work around. One option would be to edit the emulator configuration in some seemingly undocumented way. Another could be to download different images. Most actual consumer devices have more than enough internal storage (the HTC Touch Pro has 512Mb), and I seem to remember seeing device specific images at some point. Any help would be appreciated though.

I am sure amongst our very competent readership (remember 75% of us are supposed to be powerusers ) there is some-one who has solved this problem before. Please drop Brad a line and help us get another great desktop browser on Windows Mobile.

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Mobile FireFox making good progress, asking for help

August 8, 2008 | By Surur

Brad Lassey, from the Mobile Firefox team, has put up a blog post announcing major progress in porting their world-beating desktop browser to the Windows Mobile platform. In moving from the Minimo code base to the new Fennec code base, they have also optimized API calls away from older, deprecated versions, and have found not only that this work resulted in improved performance in Windows Mobile but also Windows XP/Vista due to the reduction in string conversions.

Further progress have been made on issues surrounding window management and file io, and currently xulrunner, normally a desktop run-time environment that provides the chrome for various applications like Firefox, Songbird and even Flickr Uploader, can launch various xul apps without crashing.

Brad however mentions that there are some known issues expected in the future such as font shaping that much be fixed. They have called for developers with specific knowledge in fonting (especially experience with harfbuzz), an interest in tuning performance or just a general interest in developing Firefox for Windows Mobile to join them in #mobile irc channel. The team has already had high profile recruits such as Brian Crowder, one of the architects of Firefox.

To remind readers what’s at stake, this preview of the UI of Mobile Firefox should inspire anyone with the capability to jump right in and help give birth to what promises to be a breakthrough product on the Windows Mobile platform.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

To read the more technical version visits Brad/s blog on Mozilla.org.

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Mobile Firefox not for iPhone, Android

June 14, 2008 | By Surur

CNet has just confirmed what we have said last when we posted on Mobile Firefox – No love for the iPhone. The innovative browser, that not only supports web 2.0 features, but also many of the services associated with it through the integrated Awesome Bar, will be coming to Windows Mobile as early as August.

What has been surprising and new news however is that even Android wont be supported. In the words of Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe:

“For the iPhone, Apple’s license can not install software to have an interpreted language. But Firefox includes JavaScript, which makes it legally impossible to carry on the iPhone….For Android, Webkit is integrated into the OS, and only Java applications can run. And Firefox is not written in Java. So that’s why [Fennec will not run on Android]. However, in both cases, things may change in future, but it does not depend on Mozilla.”

Going from a year ago when Windows Mobile basically lacked any “full web browsers”, it seems Windows Mobile will soon suffer an embarrassment of riches, with the new version of Pocket Internet Explorer using the desktop rendering engine due in September, Opera Mobile 9.5 already out on the HTC Touch Diamond and soon to be released generally, the incredible Mobile Firefox and even Netfront 3.5 maturing very well.

With great sales and increasing industry support, it seems now is the best time possible to be on the Windows Mobile platform.

Source: TeByte via CNet

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