Firefox for Maemo RC1
To help bring in the new year, Mozilla has released the first release candidate of Firefox for Maemo. If you've already got beta 5 installed on your N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly. Otherwise, if you're viewing this on your device, you can install it from here.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mozilla ends 2009 behind on its desktop calendar — Firefox 3.6 slipped past its predicted December final release, and Mozilla gave itself extra time on the major 4.0 update — yet its mobile track keeps moving: beta 5 of Firefox for Maemo already reached N900 and N810 owners, and this RC1 lands on New Year's Day 2010 as the next step toward a finished mobile build.
The significance is strategic rather than headline-sized: this is the same browser line that began with releases like Firefox 1.5 on Mozilla's FTP servers in 2005 and matured through the desktop betas such as Firefox 3 beta 2, now being carried onto Nokia's Linux-based handhelds — a small, device-specific audience, with no syndicated pickup recorded, but a real test of whether Mozilla can run a mobile release train alongside its strained desktop one.
First-order effects
- N900 and N810 users running beta 5 get an automatic software update to the release candidate, while others on those devices can install RC1 directly from Mozilla — the practical change is a near-final mobile Firefox on Nokia's Maemo hardware.
- Mozilla now maintains a release candidate on a non-desktop platform at the exact moment its desktop 3.6 ship date has already been missed, stretching its QA and engineering bandwidth across both.
Second-order effects
- Nokia's N900 gains a full desktop-lineage browser alternative to the software that ships on its own platform, raising the bar for what Nokia's bundled Maemo browser must match on rendering and add-on capability.
- A stable Maemo build gives web developers a reason to test against Nokia handhelds, nudging site compatibility work toward Linux-based phones alongside the iPhone-class browsers they already target.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds, Mozilla positions Firefox as a cross-platform browser layer that ships on handheld Linux devices in parallel with Windows, Mac, and Linux rather than as a desktop afterthought — an early structural bet on the browser, not the native app store, as the phone's application platform.
The trend: Mozilla is extending Firefox from the desktop onto Linux-based handhelds as a parallel release track, even while its desktop schedule slips.