Mozilla based browser engine available for testing

The maemo team has just released a development version of a new browser engine, built on open source and Mozilla technologies. Testers and contributors are welcome. This version runs and is available for download. It works on the Nokia N800 with the latest Internet Tablet OS 2007. Try it out!

Sharing the same key components than Firefox, this new browser engine has the capability to deliver advanced web technologies inside a pocketable form factor. The newest internet services will function on the Nokia N800, thanks to best-of-breed open standards support including full-AJAX, and integrated Adobe Flash 9. This also allows the creation of add-on’s to personalize the browsing experience. 

How to download and give feedback

Feedback is very helpful for the ongoing development and testing work. The application is ready for would be testers: just install the browser engine with a couple of taps and restart the browser.

After installation the Mozilla based browser engine will be set as default. The user interface of the open browser engine is shared with the official Opera browser, although a couple of new features and changes are included with this release. Most differences should be in core browsing functionality and behavior. Users can switch back to the official Opera browser engine through the 'Set Engine' menu in the browser application menu. You can also uninstall the open browser engine from Application Manager at any time, without losing bookmarks or other settings made for Opera.

You can submit feedback about bugs to bugs.maemo.org. Advanced users, developers and potential contributors can find more details in maemo.org/browser.

Add-ons and extensions

Thanks to the open standard support and shared code base with Firefox, developers are able to easily port add-ons and extensions available in mozilla.org. Firefox extensions are not directly usable, though. More detailed information on add-on development can be found on maemo.org/browser and mozilla.org

An opportunity for the future is to extend the use of web technologies outside of the basic browser environment, for widgets and even application development.

Contributors welcome

We encourage other parties to join the development of this browser engine or use it in their products. Testers and developers are welcome to bring this beta to a final release and improve this browser engine through add-on's, extensions and new functionality. You can either directly get involved upstream at the mozilla.org projects or join the browser development project at maemo.org/browser.

The browser development is being done with active synchronization with the Mozilla browser engine code-base. Nokia is also contributing the modifications and improvements back to the Mozilla Foundation to evolve Mozilla in a totally new frontier, pocketable browsing. In the future, we will continue to work on our browser solutions in active co-operation with the Mozilla browser work.

To avoid any confusion, note that this browser engine is not coming from the Minimo project. The Minimo project targets mobile devices with a reduced set of features, but bases on the same Mozilla components as the new browser for tablets.

Specifications

• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML): HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1
• JavaScript 1.7, based on ECMA-262, revision 3: ECMA-262
• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): CSS Level 1, CSS Level 2 and parts of CSS Level 3
• Document Object Model (DOM): DOM Level 1, DOM Level 2 and parts of DOM Level 3
• Extensible Markup Language (XML): XML 1.0, Namespaces in XML, Associating Style Sheets with XML
• Documents 1.0, Fragment Identifier for XML
• XSL Transformations (XSLT): XSLT 1.0
• XML Path Language (XPath): XPath 1.0