Firefox RC3 For Maemo Released: Disables Flash


The Mozilla developers have announced the third release candidate of its mobile browser for Maemo. Firefox for Maemo, also known as Fennec, with the aim to improve overall responsiveness and page load time has disabled the plugin support. This also includes the disabling of Flash support on the software.

fennec

In the blog post by Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s Director of Mobile, said “We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release.  The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.  If you wish to enable our experimental plugin support, you will be able to manually via about:config, but do so at your own risk.  We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plugins for, as some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well.”

Mozilla’s Fennec browser is competing against mobile browser giant Opera Mobile/Mini. Even though, Opera Mobile/Mini does not support plugins its main advantage of Fennec could be the ability to compress WebPages for those with limited data plan. As of now it is difficult to say how fennec would fair in the market. You can try out Fennec RC3 for Maemo supported devices, like Nokia N900 and N810, here.