Firefox Home 'coming soon' to iPhone, will sync with desktop browser
By Ross Miller 
posted May 26th 2010 9:04PM
posted May 26th 2010 9:04PM
Continuous client functionality, you say? Sounds like Mozilla might be just what the doctor ordered. The company has announced that its upcoming Firefox Home app is coming soon to the iPhone. The program will sync up with your desktop client so that you can go mobile with all your browsing history, bookmarks and "the set of tabs from [your] most recent browser session" going along for the ride. Not only that, but there's an "Awesome Bar" -- Mozilla's words, not ours -- that'll let you search through everything and predict options based on the available data. While not a "full" Firefox browser, according to the blog post (with the addendum, "either technically or due to policy"), the pages still load from within the app itself. No solidified release date yet -- it's still being polished for app store submission, but Opera's luck give us hope for a smooth approval. In the meantime, you can get a quick preview in the video after the break.
"whats so bad about it? name something bad and have a source to back it up to prove it"
I would actually like to know this too.....
My guess is that they are going to be using the WebKit widget to do the HTML rendering (and JavaScript etc) to avoid the fact that a Gecko port would violate the iPhone SDK agreement.
I hope this will better than Opera for iPhone... Yea yea Opera is faster than Safari but it sucks when resizing and also has a bad GUI
@hnb
What it lacks in features (pinch to zoom and the ability to run javascript) it more than makes up for with speed. It makes viewing webpages practical over edge. How cool is that? REALLY COOL!
I would use this.
@BecauseItsNotGoogle
Here you go: http://gizmodo.com/5090988/mobile-browser-battlemodo-which-phones-deliver-the-real-web
If its not a wireless sync, then its "FAIL"
even if firefox does come to the iphone it wont integrate!
for instance take opera mini, even if you have it in your iphone when you click a link in another app it goes to safari not opera! (I think thats why the app store approved it!)
@Cydoniac Actually, firefox is probably the worst browser there is. It's been inundated with ridiculous memory leaks since early v2 days, and it still happens. IE has been stable and worked well as a primary browser since version 7, for me.
@KJ42
You link is about Mobile Browsers, I believe the BING guy was asking about the Desktop Browser faults of IE.
@Jordus
Bullshit. I cry a little bit inside every time I have to leave Firefox and go to IE because of Microsoft's proprietary crap that no other browser can handle. I don't have any facts or anything like that to back me up; I can just tell that it is an awful browser just after using it (reluctantly) for a few minutes. And this is from someone who loves most things Microsoft.
XMarks for iPhone would make me very happy indeed.
Looks like this is part response to Chrome overtaking Firefox in adaption rates, aka the Chrome threat is real & FF *is* worried.
What more to do than getting in bed with #1: that is, iPhone/Apple. Makes sense, but with Apple pushing Safari pretty hard, this could be a death blow to Firefox in the long run--bad strategy.
They should have teamed up with a RIM app (Apple-Safari, Google-Chrome, Nokia-Opera, MS-IE, etc...). That would have made the mobile browser wars interesting.
@recharged95
In what universe is the iPhone #1? RIM still has a larger market share, and more phones are being sold with Android than with the iPhone OS. They seem to be #2 at best to me.
Where can I cop one of those cases?
@abedinthehouse did you even read the comments you're trying to back up? BING is referring specifically to mobile browsers and mobile IE.
@BecauseItsNotGoogle what?! read your own comments: "IE mobile will destroy this anyways," and "talking about mobile browsers in general." Just because the comments have been downranked into oblivion doesn't let you get away with pretending you've said something entirely different.
@KJ42
Read it but missed the first one apparently....he may have been referring to mobile browsers, but I was referring to the desktop, because people still complain about the desktop version as well. I personally dont use it but thats because Ive grow attached to Firefox, I wanted to know if there was any real reasons why people nag on desktop IE.
@BecauseItsNotGoogle
Ever try using the browser on the zune hd. It is a nightmare.
Android 2.2 has chrome-to-phone and that's much cooler.
@woshishui
I would use this. And smash your face with it.
@BecauseItsNotGoogle
Ever see that video where Chrome is so fast it beats lightning? IE sucks and it always has. not too big on Firefox either but its still better than IE, slightly..
This is junk. This is exactly what I don't want from Mozilla. I browse totally different on my iPhone than my PC. And the awesome bar has never been awesome. There is no way to clear it and it always lists porn sites at the top of the list. That's a little awkward when guests are using my computer to browse. Yes, I like porn, and yes I have visited all those sites, but FFS let me clear my 'awesome bar' like I can my history. I don't want all my bookmarks and certainly not all my prior tabs to open on my iPhone. I usually have 10-20 tabs active at once. That would surely crash my phone, and if not, it would still be overwhelming and useless.
Opera on the other hand is freakin AWESOME. It allows you to load pages super fast even on EDGE. It loads pages faster on Edge than Safari on 3G. The home tab screen is also awesome, and while it is totally lacking in features, including pinch-to-zoom, it provides functionality unparalleled by anything else in the AppStore to date.
@politicalslug you obviously don't understand yet the private mode, nor the "delete last hour" and similar. the awesome bar, indeed, is awesome. but cleaning/clearing your history is not part of it. it's part of the history.
ctrl-shift-p for your porn.
@davepermen
That's your response? Open a private session whenever I'm viewing porn on my home computer? How about no. I have bookmarks too, and I don't delete those. The "awesome bar" doesn't clear. So whether I start using private tabs now, which I won't, it wouldn't make the slightest difference as there is no way to remove the old sites that show up every time I type in the "awesome" address bar. Any more bright ideas genius?
@politicalslug
get a girlfriend? :)
The only "awesome bar" is an open bar...
...I'm such an alcoholic....I need to seek help
Safari is an E P I C F A I L ! ! !
I am stoked for this release!
@abedinthehouse I'm sorry but the entire thread context was referring to mobile browsers, so to misconstrue it as discussing desktop browsers means you fail basic reading comprehension.
If you want to compare desktops nevertheless, the facts are that IE is still by far the slowest, least capable of the major browsers (Safari, Firefox, and Chrome). Webkit is at the cutting edge, with Firefox not too far behind. IE9 may change things, but that's still yet to be delivered.
This is stupid. It's not even a browser!
What people don't seem to ubderstand is that this app uses Safari for displaying web content. Well most likely.
i've been wanting my ipod/android browser to sync with my desktop browser for ages. shame i dont use firefox
Nice lesson ! : "How to talk about a concept in the futur of Ithings ... while Froyo has already demonstrated something like this last week" (2nd day keynote)
I love Firefox, believe me. But FFX on OSX sucks big time. But seriously. Even my iBook G4 (2004) could launch Safari much faster then my late-2007 iMac, and don't even mention launching Opera on G4, it's amazingly fast. Just hope that it won't have to wait like 2 week to launch Firefox-on-iPhone
@Mujikun
You need to use a PC then.
They need to use Webkit because Gecko only runs on the highest end of phones right now because of the code bloat.
It's a technical deficiency in their code base.
@(Unverified)
no, they need to use Webkit because Apple won't allow an alternative browser that does client side rendering of HTML. So they added the Weave feature to the default rendering engine in Safari.
@christexaport You are correct.
But I am also correct, in fact we are both correct.
Gecko = not as suitable as Webkit for mobile devices
Apple = does not allow “client side rendering of HTML” (although it is the client side execution of Javascript they are more concerned about from a security perspective, hence Opera Mini is allowed).
This is just a Weave Sync plugin for the default browser engine. Nothing special, imo.
no Chrome anyone?
@gatorduck Yeah, I was wondering the same...
why won't they give us the firefox browser instead?
@deepen03 Blame Apple for that.
@KJ42 Shh! Don't confuse the poor soul with adequate use of English and basic understanding of web-browser technology!
meh I am back using Safari already,
whats the point of using Opera when all the links pop open in Safari
Dear lords.
It's always the iPhone.