Thursday, 22 July 2010

Firefox Home iPhone App Review

Mozilla have released an iPhone app to accompany their popular web browser Firefox. Firefox is so popular in fact that it is fast becoming the default browser for websites minimum requirements, and many companies are encouraging their employees to use Firefox. Due to Apple's App store approval requirements (or so it is cited)...
... Firefox Home is Not a Web Browser.
This leads on to the question, what is Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is an iPhone app that allows you to view the contents of Firefox Sync. Firefox Sync is an Add-on for Firefox which allows you synchronise your bookmarks and open tabs across multiple computers. On your iPhone you can view these bookmarks and open tabs and open them in the in built browser (where they don't seem to open particularly quickly or accurately, but hey it's not a web browser!) or open them in Mobile Safari (which really is the only option).

So this app is for people who are in love with Firefox and would like the ability to see their bookmarks whilst out and about (but not add to them!). For those serious about syncing bookmarks to between their computer(s) and iPhone over the air MobileMe is a better (and more expensive) option.

For those who want this ability between two or more computers Google Chrome offers a far better option. The set up process on Google Chrome is just your Google account details. For Firefox you need to download the Firefox Sync Add-on to each PC and go through a lengthy set up wizard with username, password and a secret phrase. Firefox Sync does allow you to store your bookmarks on your server though, but is this really a worthwhile feature?

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