

Mozilla's Firefox Sync client submitted to Apple App Store - mbrubeck
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/06/30/firefox-home-submitted-to-apple-app-store/

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kjhughes
It's Firefox Home, not Sync, that's been submitted to App Store. The release
FAQ explains the difference:

"What is the difference between Firefox Sync and Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is a native iPhone application that does a one-way data refresh
of your Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone, whereas
Firefox Sync is an add-on for Firefox that does a two-way sync of a user’s
Firefox history, bookmarks, open tabs and saved passwords between their
desktop and Firefox mobile-enabled devices."

<https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/1.0/releasenotes/>

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Sadranyc
This looks promising. Firefox could win me back from Chrome with this
addition.

Currently, syncing bookmarks with Mobile Safari if you use any other browser
than IE or Safari (in Windows), is very unconfortable.

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jistein
How do you do it at all? Some kind of web interface?

You know, I don't own a smartphone but I had never thought of this. I rely on
my bookmarks quite a bit...

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illumin8
Looks like it might be a nice app. I wonder if Chrome will ever be released
for iOS?

I've been using a 3rd-party web browser on iPad called "Atomic Web" and it is
pretty nice. Of course it uses the WebKit engine to render, but it has ad-
block, real tabs, privacy mode, and can do user-agent switching to make mobile
websites render properly. For 99 cents it's a worthy purchase.

~~~
mbrubeck
Neither Chrome nor Firefox can be released for iOS in anything like their
current form (at least through the App Store). The current current SDK
agreement forbids interpreters, which means Google can't ship V8, and Mozilla
can't ship Tracemonkey.

All browsers in the App Store must use Apple's interpreters or none at all
(like Opera Mini, which does its rendering on a server-side proxy and can't
run JavaScript on the client).

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borisk
"with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded
interpreted code" - from the dev agreement. A few games have been approved to
host an interpreter. So it's just a matter of Apple deciding if they want
fully featured Firefox, Chrome, Opera or not.

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mbrubeck
You left out part of it:

"Notwithstanding the foregoing, an Application may use embedded interpreted
code _in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or
functionality_ that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of
the Application."

You _might_ argue that executing JavaScript is a "minor feature" of a web
browser. Then maybe Chrome would be allowed. But almost of Firefox's frontend
is also written in JavaScript and tied to Mozilla's JavaScript engine. So
there's no way that we (mobile Firefox) fall within the "in a limited way..."
allowance.

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sabj
I first read this as, "Microsoft's Firefox Sync client submitted to the Apple
App Store" and thought to myself, "wow, here in 2010, how things have
changed..."

:) I look forward to seeing the day that this (hopefully) gets approved, even
though I'm not an iOS user.

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ajg1977
I'm such a pedant when it comes to commercials, but wifi on an iPod Touch in
your Prius?

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carbocation
Did anyone else get a kick out of their sentence, "Firefox Home helps give you
the information you need, when you need it!"?

If it's not an intentional reference to the world's biggest domain squatter,
then it's a hilarious "incidentaloma." (The domain squatter's phrase is, "what
you need, when you need it," e.g., <http://www.bang.com> )

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mgrouchy
Pretty clever way to make sure that the app actually gets approved by Apple.

~~~
fletchowns
Yeah, I can't believe another company that makes a competing product hasn't
thought of publicly announcing when they submitted their mobile browser to the
app store.

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icco
I want this on android pretty bad.

