Release Candidate of Firefox Mobile is Coming Next Week

Mozilla plans to have a release candidate of Firefox Mobile available next week with the final version coming soon after, according to a Cnet report.

"Our goal is to have a release candidate next week," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile. "If things go smoothly, we'll have a (final) version out in the next few weeks," with the debut planned for this year, he added.

The first mobile Firefox version will run on Nokia's N900, a Windows Mobile of mobile Firefox is set to arrive next year, and Mozilla has begun working on an Android version now that Google released a native developer kit.


Mobile Firefox is based on the same code as the present Firefox 3.6 and will synchronize bookmarks, passwords, and even open tabs with the desktop version of the browser. Additionally, Firefox for the N900 will run many extensions with about 30 or so being already available.

Firefox supports geolocation and orientation detection with many more features available in 2010, such as:

● Support for multitouch displays for a more sophisticated user interface.
● Support for haptic feedback, such as the phone vibrating when a virtual keyboard key is tapped.
● The ability to control a camera.
● Support for Electrolysis, Mozilla's project to split tasks such as the user interface, tabs, and plug-ins into separate processes. That improves stability and performance, he said.
● Support for JetPack, Mozilla's next-generation extensions system.
● Integration of the Weave synchronization software so it's no longer a plug-in.
● Support for WebGL, an interface to provide browsers with accelerated 3D graphics.
● Faster execution of JavaScript programs that are common and increasingly powerful on the Web.