Mozilla yesterday announced that its Firefox Home app for iPhone had been accepted and is ready for download from the App Store. The app, which works with Firefox's Sync add-on, lets you access your Firefox bookmarks, open tabs, and browser history from your iPhone when you're away from the computer. We took it for a test drive and came away impressed with the convenience it offers, even if it doesn't offer true Firefox browsing.

Setup

Before you can use Firefox Home on your iPhone, there is one other important bit you need to install, which is the Firefox Sync add-on. Previously called Weave, the add-on will be integrated in Firefox 4, but Mozilla offers it as an optional add-on for current versions of Firefox.

You'll need to install the Firefox Sync add-on and set up an account to use Firefox Home.

Once you install the Sync add-on, you'll need to set up an account. You'll also need to configure it to sync your computer to Mozilla's sync server. While the Sync feature can be set up to use a private server, Firefox Home doesn't have this option; it only works with Mozilla's server. If data security is a concern, however, Sync uses a special passphrase key—not stored on the server—to encrypt the data, and it is decrypted on your iPhone using that key.

(One nice thing about Sync is you can also use the service on more than one computer, and it works across OS platforms. So if you use Firefox on your Windows work computer, for instance, you can access tabs and bookmarks from your home Mac and vice versa.)

Simple UI

You can browse all the open tabs on any machine you have set up with Firefox Sync. Clicking a link opens the page in a WebKit view.

Once Sync is set up and all of your browsing data is synched, you can use Firefox Home on your iPhone to access your history and bookmarks as well as any open tabs on your local machine. Search will pull up items from your history, bookmarks, and open tabs. Bookmarks and tabs are presented in convenient, browsable lists. The settings allow you to sign out of your Sync account (and sign in with a different one, if need be) as well as force a refresh.

In addition to tabs and bookmarks, you can also access your recent browsing history—but only by using the search feature.

Unfortunately, browsing history is only available using the search. There's room for another button on the app's nav bar, so we're hoping Mozilla adds a browsable list of your history in a future update—we can imagine plenty of scenarios where this would be handy.

Though it should come as no surprise, Firefox Home doesn't use Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine or its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. When you click on any link, it loads in a custom WebKit view with a simple but nice looking UI. While it doesn't look particularly "Firefoxy," it does fit right in on the iPhone. It also offers an option to copy or e-mail a link to the current open page or open it in Mobile Safari.

The only other caveat that we noticed—which is due to Apple's policy on apps that access the open Web—is that Firefox Home is rated 17+ for Parental Controls. This won't likely be an issue for most users, but it's still irritating when this restriction doesn't apply to Mobile Safari.

Overall, Firefox Home is a bit of a one-trick pony, but it does its trick very well. If you use Firefox often, it's definitely worth installing—both the Firefox Home app and the Firefox Sync add-on are free. If you're at all like me and leave dozens (or more!) tabs open on your home machine, you'll definitely like the convenience of being able to access something you left open while you're on the go. It isn't exactly like having an actual mobile version of Firefox on your iPhone, but it is probably the closest you'll get given the current App Store restrictions.