Firefox 7.0 is the browser that I am currently using on my N900. Its pretty fast compared to its predecessors. Its not even in BETA and all you can get is the nightly build. For me, its okay, as I like playing with my systems and mobile. If that is okay with you read on….

Head over to the firefox nightly build website Firefox Nightly Builds. Go to the links for the mobile version and then select Maemo build and download it.. Copy the tar.bz2 file to your N900 or directly download it from the handset 🙂

Once done ,

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      tar zvfr <filename>
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This will create the directory fennec. Note the complete path, we will need that in sometime. Its no good, if you have a browser and you cannot access it from a menu 🙂

So, we will now add this to the network menu.

Open a terminal on your N900 or ssh to your mobile and follow the below steps:

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      cd /usr/share/applications/hildon
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Now if you have installed Fennec already that copy fennect.desktop to fennec7.desktop:

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      &nbsp;cp fennec.desktop fennec7.desktop
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and open the file with your favourite editor and change the name of the Exec and the Name. If you dont have that file, copy paste the below into that file. Dont forget to change the Exe to that of the complete path of the fennec executable.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=0.1
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fire-Nightly
Comment=Firefox mobile browser
Exec=/opt/fennec/fennec
StartupWMClass=Navigator
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Network;
Icon=fennec
X-Icon-Path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=fennec
X-Window-Icon-dimmed=fennec
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable
X-Osso-Service=mozilla.fennec
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;

[X-Osso-URI-Actions]
http=X-Osso-URI-Action-Open
https=X-Osso-URI-Action-Open
ftp=X-Osso-URI-Action-Open
file=X-Osso-URI-Action-Open

[X-Osso-URI-Action-Open]
Method=load_url
Name=uri_link_open_link
TranslationDomain=osso-uri

 

Before you can see another entry for Fennec in the menu, you might have to kill hildon and/or restart your mobile.

Related articles

• Firefox 5 beta released: CSS animation, boosted performance, more (slashgear.com)
• Firefox for Mobile gets Aurora and Nightly channels (geek.com)
• Mozilla moves more than half of Firefox 4 users to new version (macworld.com)

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