Firefox Mobile review

As with all good things there are a few drawbacks though. The browser is currently only available for Nokia’s Maemo operating system, or more accurately the N900 and N810 devices. Both of these devices offer resistive rather than capacitive touch screens and we felt this hampered stylus-free browsing.

While it is usable without a stylus it just isn’t responsive or accurate enough, which in our view unfairly limits Firefox’s usefulness as the true mobile application that it’s shaping up to be. The other caveat with Firefox is the lack of Flash. It was included in alpha and beta versions but has been disabled in the stable release due to compatibility problems.

It can be enabled via the ‘about:config’ page but Mozilla doesn’t recommend this as it can affect performance quite considerably. Whilst we commend its honesty we felt somewhat locked out of a world of potentially useful online apps.

Another issue is the retention of passwords and personal information. We found that, even after we had disabled our Weave Sync account and reset the application our bookmarks and passwords remained. As you’d expect the information can be easily removed but we felt that were one in a rush, this oversight could potentially prove costly, especially when work handsets change hands or are recycled. It’s certainly something to be mindful of in the corporate environment.