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Firefox Mobile on Nokia N900 hands-on photos: Fire in your trousers

Firefox Mobile -- formerly known as Fennec -- is almost out of beta, and we got our hands on a shiny new Nokia N900 to try out the Web browser's sweet feature suite

Flora Graham
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We're still clinging to the name Fennec -- it's a smashing big-eared fox, after all. But even with its new, boring name, Firefox Mobile, we still found much to love in the mobile browser from Mozilla. In our recent test of mobile Web browsers, it was the fastest and most innovative one we used.

But we had to test the alpha Windows Mobile version on a frankly mediocre Toshiba TG01. The boys from Mozilla took pity and lent us a shiny new Nokia N900 Maemo phone to show off the upcoming release version in all its glory.

Mozilla told us we should expect Firefox Mobile to be out of beta in mid-December for phones running Maemo -- so that means the Nokia N900, which you probably won't have. It couldn't tell us why it hadn't gone with Android, another open-source mobile operating system that actually has phones we can buy, but it did promise plenty more versions, for a range of OSs, are on their way.

You can find the latest version of Firefox Mobile at mozilla.com/mobile. In the meantime, click 'Continue' to check out our hands-on photos of the little vixen's fabulous features.

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The address bar at the top of the page doesn't stay put -- it scrolls away when you scroll down a page. This frees up more screen for the page.
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A swipe to the right reveals a list of open pages as tiny thumbnails. This is also where you access Weave, of which more on the next page.
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Weave is an add-on developed by Mozilla which merges all your Firefoxes -- whether on your desktop PC or your mobile. Your passwords, history and bookmarks are all available on the go, and it even shows the tabs you had open in your other browsers.
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A swipe to the right reveals the bookmarking toolbar, and the options menu. We adored the side menus, which are easy to access without taking up any space when you don't want them.
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The Firefox 'awesome bar' lives in Firefox mobile -- it's an address bar that also shows your your history and bookmarks. Typing a few characters gets you to a previously visited or bookmarked page -- very handy on a mobile phone, where typing is often a pain.
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You can also search from a customisable list of search engines along the bottom of the page.
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Like its desktop big brother, Firefox Mobile can be customised with add-ons, such as Weave. You can search for more on the normal Web page or directly from within the add-on manager.
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The download manager is the icing on the cake, because it's often hard to know where your downloads end up on a mobile phone. You can pause and resume downloads here too -- but we'd love to see a setting that resumes downloads over Wi-Fi and pauses them when we're on 3G.

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