If you’ve been hankering for the day Firefox would be available for iOS, it’s finally here.
Mozilla has announced that its Firefox browser is now available for iOS and can be used on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
Until today, Firefox for iOS was available as a public preview, and only in New Zealand. Launching first in New Zealand has become a common practice for testing new apps and features on the Web — companies use the country as a test market because it has a small population and English is the primary language.
Over the course of its preview launch in September, Mozilla stated it would expand to “a few more” countries prior to its launch. The company seems to have jumped ahead to a full release regardless.
Highlights for the browser include the following:
– Intelligent Search provides suggested search results and the choice of search providers.
– Visual Tabs lets you manage multiple browser tabs on the same screen.
– Firefox Accounts lets you export your Firefox browser history, bookmarks, passwords, and tabs from desktop and Android to your iOS device.
– Private Browsing gives you the ability to browse the Web without saving history or sharing existing cookies with the sites you visit.
This represents a significant milestone, as back in 2013, Mozilla had refused to bring its browser to iOS, putting the blame on Apple for not letting browser makers use their own rendering engine.
Firefox for iOS requires iOS 8.2 or later to install and run.
If you’ve had a chance to try the browser and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.
Via VentureBeat and the App Store
One reply on “Mozilla releases Firefox for iOS”
Firefox for iOS is pretty good for a 1.1 release. Unfortunately it suffers from two issues that are stopping me from using it as my main iOS browser:
1. It doesn’t support 1Password, a major pain when so many websites I use have their logins safely stashed away in that marvellous app. Hopefully this is only a temporary shortcoming and FF will soon be enhanced to support 1PW.
2. Firefox sync fails to transfer all my bookmarks from my desktop (OS X, Windows and Linux) Firefox sync account. I have a large collection of bookmarks carefully collected and curated over many years filed away in nested folders by topic and subject matter. After syncing with my FF account many of the bookmark folders on iOS FF are either empty or contain but a single bookmark (but other folders are fine and contain all they should). So far I have been unable to determine why this is happening or how to fix it. It looks like a bug that will require a fixed version of FF to address.
Given that until now I have had to run 3rd party bookmark syncing software on my Mac to handle the syncing of bookmarks between Safari on iOS/OS X and FF on OS X, I was greatly looking forward to being able to just use FF sync on iOS, but unfortunately I cannot due to this bug.
Aside from these two issues FF on iOS works well and is smooth to use. Hopefully these issue will soon be addressed and I’ll finally be able to use FF on all my devices instaed of constantly having to switch back and forth between different browsers depend on which device I’m using.