Mozilla announced last week the availability of Firefox for Maemo 1.0, the first official release of Firefox Mobile for Nokia's Linux-based smartphone operating system. It offers adequate browsing performance, support for add-ons, and a finger-friendly user interface that includes popular Firefox features like the AwesomeBar.

This Firefox variant is based on the Fennec project, which was originally launched in 2007 with the aim of bringing the full Firefox browsing experience to modern handheld devices. In the time that has transpired since the inception of the project, advancements in mobile computing hardware have significantly boosted the performance of smartphones. That factor, coupled with Mozilla's aggressive optimization efforts, have made it possible for Firefox to become a mobile browser.

Mozilla eventually hopes to bring Firefox Mobile to several operating systems, but has largely focused on Maemo and Windows Mobile during the early stages of development. The Maemo port is the first to achieve a sufficient level of maturity to deserve an official 1.0 release. I conducted extensive testing of Firefox for Maemo on the Nokia N900, a powerful smartphone with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor.

Mozilla hosts its own Firefox Mobile package repository for Maemo 5, the operating system that runs on the N900. To install Firefox Mobile on the device, navigate to firefox.com/m with the N900's native browser and click the "Download" button. It will launch the platform's package manager and walk you through the short process of enabling the proper repository and installing the relevant package. After it is installed, the program can be launched from the application list.

User interface

The user interface has the same basic design that we originally saw in the first Fennec alpha back in 2008. The general look and feel of the application hasn't changed much since then aside from some minor aesthetic refinements and a few alterations to make it fit in better on Maemo 5. The top of the screen is dominated by the URL bar, which displays the page title when the user is not inputting text. It also shows the favicon and a refresh button. The URL bar will show your bookmarks when it gains focus, and it will provide AwesomeBar completion as you type.

The browser will always run in fullscreen mode, obscuring the platform's standard taskbar. The buttons that appear to the right and left of the URL bar provide a way to access Maemo's task selector and quit the program. The URL bar is tied to the top of the webpage. When the user scrolls down, the bar will roll off the top of the screen and disappear. It can be accessed by scrolling back to the top or invoking the sidebar panels. This is a relatively practical design decision because it ensures that valuable screen space isn't wasted by the URL bar.

The sidebar panels are activated by dragging the page all the way to the left or right. The left-hand panel provides access to your browser tabs and the right-hand panel provides access to settings, add-ons, and a number of other features. Firefox Mobile has moderately decent support for tabbed browsing, but lacks some of the useful features of the Firefox desktop browser. The highest number of tabs that I had open at one time during my test was six, but there doesn't really seem to be a limit. It got a bit sluggish at that level but was still usable.

The tabs show up as thumbnails in a vertical column on the left-hand pane. Each column can accommodate up to four tabs. When I exceeded four, it added an additional column. You can switch to a tab by clicking its thumbnail in the interface. Each one has is overlaid with a red close button that you can click to close the tab. The close button looks a bit small on the device, but I had no difficulty hitting it and I almost never hit it by accident.

You can open a new tab by clicking the tab button that is displayed at the bottom of the sidebar. Unfortunately, the only way to open a specific link in a new tab is to slide out the N900's keyboard and hold the ctrl key while you tap the link on the screen. I'd personally prefer to be able to do that without the keyboard, perhaps by clicking and holding.

The right-hand sidebar has a button near the top that can be used to bookmark the current page. It works a lot like the star from the desktop version's URL bar. Directly below it, you will find the back and forward buttons which can be used to navigate through the browser history. I was not able to find a way to view the complete history like you can with the desktop version.

At the bottom of the sidebar, there is a button with a gear icon. You can click this to get to the extended preference panel. It has browser settings, downloads, and add-ons. The number of settings that are accessible through the preference panel is a somewhat limited. You can toggle images and JavaScript, control cookie behavior, and clear private data. Fortunately, power users can still dive into about:config to change pretty much any setting. It works exactly like it does on the desktop.