PreFox is the webOS Firefox Browser

PreFox is an early proof-of-concept web browser for webOS based on the the same source code as Mozilla Firefox for Mobile.

The default webOS browser is fast and simple to use but Mozilla Firefox for Mobile features many benefits:

• Better support for web standards allowing rich sites like Flickr to function correctly
• Multiple tabs and session restore
• Remembering cookies and passwords for sites
• Built in synchronisation of bookmarks and history with desktop Firefox
• The awesomebar
• Support for many add-ons

The challenge was to see if the current Palm Pre hardware and its platform webOS was capable of running such a full featured web browser. The answer is, probably yes, but there is still work to do.

Startup is too slow. It is probably not possible to equal the startup speed of webOS built in browser but it still needs to be faster to be useful.Currently PreFox runs and can be used to browse the web but the following key things keep it from being truly usable:

• Memory use is currently too high often giving the “Too many cards” errors.
• Sometimes while running PreFox will become slow for periods of time, clearly it is doing something in the background that needs to be identified.
• Various UI and functionality tweaks specific for webOS.
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In the case of the first three a lot of the work that the Mozilla team are doing to improve things on the Android platform will translate directly to PreFox.

PreFox requires webOS 1.4.5 and so far has only been tested on a Sprint Palm Pre. It probably works a little better on a Palm Pre Plus but I have no idea whether it would even start on a Palm Pixi.