Mozilla

in case you haven’t heard yet, Firefox for mobile (Fennec) is bumping it’s version numbering to more closely match desktop releases of Firefox. This means “Firefox 2.0b1 for Android & Maemo” is becoming “Firefox 4.0b1 for Android & Maemo” and will be released as “Firefox 4 for Android and Nokia N900”. We are aligning mobile Firefox and desktop Firefox since the web rendering engines used in both browsers are the same. Treating them as the same version seemed like the right thing to do.

It’s been a while since I posted about news things happening in Fennec and now I have a backlog! Let’s jump right into the list of new features you’ll find in the Fennec 2.0 nightlies:

This is a public service announcement for those people interested in the future of JavaXPCOM. JavaXPCOM has been disabled and will likely to removed from the Mozilla source tree in the future. See Benjamin Smedberg’s newsgroup post for more details.

The Mozilla Labs team has been working very hard to move the core part of Firefox Sync (nee Weave Sync) into the main Mozilla source repository. They finished a few days ago. Now any Mozilla application can start to use the core features of Firefox Sync without requiring the user to install an add-on. The system is built right into the application.

We haven’t even released the final Firefox for Maemo 1.1 yet, but we have been very busy working on features and changes for the next major release. Check out the Fennec 2.0 project planning page.

In previous versions of Firefox Mobile, you could check for and install updates for your add-ons by pressing the “Update” button in the Add-ons Manager. This meant that you could check whenever and as often as you wanted, but, if you didn’t really want to manage these things manually, you could find yourself without the latest versions.