Mozilla releases Firefox for Maemo RC3, disables Adobe Flash

Firefox for Maemo RC3, running on Mac OS X with tabbed browsing windows. The Mozilla developers have announced the availability of the third release candidate (RC3) of Firefox for Maemo, also known as "Fennec". The latest release of the mobile web browser for Nokia's N810 and N900 mobile computers running the Maemo open source operating system is primarily aimed at improving overall responsiveness and page load times.

In order to improve performance, the developers have decided to disable plugin support, including Adobe's Flash plugin, for this release. In a post on the Mozilla Blog, Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla's Director of Mobile said that, "The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards".

Users can, however, enable experimental plugin support manually via about:config, but Parmenter says they are doing so at their own risk. He does say that the developers are working on an add-on which will allow users to control which plugins are enabled for specific sites as "some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well". The developers also note that they have tuned the preferences and improved several algorithms, allowing for better zooming and panning performance.

Users testing the release are asked to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter; more details about the release can be found in the release notes. Nokia N810 and N900 users can download the latest release by visiting Firefox.com/m. Alternatively, users can install a version of Firefox for Maemo to try on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux systems.

(crve)