Mozilla’s Firefox Home app is now available for download from the iTunes App Store. Firefox Home isn’t a full blown web browser for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. What the app does is give you mobile access the bookmarks, history, and currently open tabs from the desktop version of Firefox.
In order to sync your data, you’ll need to install the Firefox Sync add-on to your desktop browser. This will let you sync your bookmarks, passwords, history, and other preferences across multiple instances of Firefox on a computer or mobile device (although the password sync doesn’t work with Firefox Home… yet).
Once you’ve got Firefox Sync installed, you just download and install the free Firefox Home app for your Apple mobile device, login with your Sync credentials, and your data should appear automatically. If it doesn’t, you can hit the settings tab and click refresh.
Now for the strange part. Even though Firefox Home isn’t a fully functional web browser, it does let you visit web pages. It’s just that typing a URL into the location bar will only bring up items shared in your bookmarks, tabs, and history. You can’t visit a web site that isn’t already stored in your personal data. But as long as you’ve bookmarked a page on your desktop browser, you can render it in Firefox Home without using Apple’s Safari web browser. If you’d prefer to use Safari, you can always click a button to open the same page in Safari.
No, I don’t have any idea why Mozilla included that functionality either. But they did.
I’m hearing reports that Firefox Home is currently only available in the US version of the App Store.
Firefox Home isn’t a perfect solution for synchronizing your data between devices, but it does provide iPhone users with a way to take PC or Mac browser information with them on the go. Of course, another way to access your desktop browser preferences on a mobile device would be to use the Opera browser on your computer and Opera Mobile or Opera Mini on supported mobile devices, since Opera’s mobile browsers are full fledged web browsers which also happen to be able to sync with the desktop version.
