Browsers on Maemo
Browsers on Maemo were the internet programs that shipped with the Nokia N900 and the community ports that replaced them, and the story splits into two devices: Maemo 5 on the N900, with MicroB as its default and Firefox 3.6.9 as the port people actually switched to, and Sailfish OS on the later Jolla hardware, where Firefox 46 stayed the built-in engine until Jolla replaced it in 2025. This page covers the Maemo side in detail, the N900 in particular, and then traces the same four names through the Sailfish OS lineage.
What shipped, and what the community installed
The factory image of the N900, sold from 2009, carried MicroB, the default browser built by Nokia on the WebKit engine that shipped in Maemo 5. The Ovi Store on the device sold add-ons and games, but the browser that earned its place in the community came from maemo.org, the official developer platform, where packages for the N900 were published in the extras-devel repository. A user who wanted a real desktop-grade engine installed one of 3 ports: Firefox 3.6.9, the stable branch, Opera 10.1, the final Maemo build, and MicroB itself, which sat in the first-party repository.
What you could actually install
The table below lists the 4 browser families that ran on the N900, with the version the community actually used, and the state of each one today.
| Browser | Maemo 5 version on the N900 | Source | Status today |
|---|---|---|---|
| MicroB | 0.5.x, default | First-party repository | Historical, archived with Maemo 5 |
| Firefox | 3.6.9, stable branch | extras-devel, maemo.org | Historical; its successors run on Sailfish OS |
| Opera | 10.1 | extras-devel, maemo.org | Historical; the engine later resurfaced as the Jolla browser |
| Chrome | Never, on the N900 | None | Unlikely to return; Android Chrome on Jolla is a different build |
The N900 had a 600 MHz ARM CPU, 256 MB of RAM and a 480 by 800 pixel screen, so the porters optimised for that hardware: the Firefox 3.6.9 build used a shared WebKit-style render path only where necessary, and the Opera 10.1 build was the one people called the fastest, because its rendering engine was written from scratch rather than ported. What you could actually install on the N900 was exactly that short list, and the 2 most common daily drivers were Firefox 3.6.9 and Opera 10.1.
Which one ran best on the hardware
Which one ran best on the 600 MHz N900 hardware split cleanly into 2 camps, and the split was about rendering, not about features. Opera 10.1 used its own engine, so it rendered the 800 pixel wide layout of a typical news site in a single pass that Firefox had to break into several layout cycles. On pages heavy with images, MicroB held its own, because it stripped styling by default and fetched the raw HTML, a mode it called plain text view.
- MicroB: fastest page loads, weakest CSS support, the only one with a built-in RSS reader.
- Opera 10.1: fastest rendering, the best JavaScript engine of the 3, no extension system.
- Firefox 3.6.9: strongest CSS support, the only one with a usable extension manager, heaviest memory use at about 120 MB on a full page.
The 256 MB of RAM on the N900 was the real constraint: Firefox 3.6.9 with 4 tabs open would hit swap, and the swap file on the device was limited, so the community rule of thumb was 3 tabs maximum. That is why the phrase "it works on the N900" carried weight in the forums; it meant the build had been tested on the lowest-spec device in the family, not just on an emulator.
What happened after Maemo died
Maemo 5 stopped receiving updates after 2011, when Nokia exited the platform, and the browser story moved onto the hardware Jolla built from the same lineage. The first Jolla phone ran Sailfish OS 1.0 in 2013, and its default browser was a rework of the Opera 10.1 engine, which was the direct descendant of the port the N900 community had loved. In 2017, Jolla 2 shipped with Sailfish OS 2.0 and a browser that Jolla quietly rebuilt on Gecko, the engine behind Firefox, so the browser that had started life as a Maemo port was now running the same code base as Firefox 46, the last version that could be compiled for the platform without Android dependencies.
The reason for the switch was practical: the Opera engine on Sailfish was a 2010 code base, and web standards had moved past it. Firefox 46, released in 2016, was the final Firefox version that could be built natively for the Sailfish ARM architecture, and it stayed the default through Sailfish OS 4.x until Jolla replaced it with a Firefox-based build in 2025, the same year it dropped the Android compatibility layer. The numbers line up: 46 is the version, 2016 is its release year, and 2025 is the year the 9 year run ended.
Does Chrome exist on any of this hardware
No, Chrome never ran natively on Maemo, on the N900 or on any Jolla phone. The reason is architectural: Chrome on Linux expects a desktop X11 or Wayland stack and a glibc toolchain that neither Maemo 5 nor Sailfish OS provided in a form that would let the browser render. On the N900, the closest thing was a Chromium-based experiment in the extras-devel repository around 2010, and it never left the experimental stage; the build required 512 MB of RAM that the device did not have. On Sailfish OS, the Android compatibility layer that shipped in later versions can run the Android build of Chrome, but that is an Android app running inside a container, not a native browser, and it is not what the community meant when it asked for Chrome on the N900.
Maps and navigation on the N900 filled the same slot that a browser filled on other devices: the community port of OsmAnd, the open source mapping application, used a WebKit view for its map tiles, so the browser engine doubled as the map renderer. That was the 1 concrete example of the N900 browser doing double duty, and it is why MicroB, the weakest CSS renderer, was still the one people kept installed alongside Firefox.
What the N900 browser means for the Sailfish OS browser question
The answer to "sailfish os browser" is a 3-step lineage, and every step is traceable back to the N900. Step 1, the Opera 10.1 engine that the N900 community adopted as its fastest browser, became the default browser on the first Jolla phone in 2013. Step 2, the 2017 rebuild on Gecko, made the Jolla browser a Firefox derivative, and Firefox 46 became the fixed version ceiling of the platform. Step 3, the 2025 replacement, kept the Firefox base but moved the build pipeline, so the current Sailfish OS browser is still, in code base terms, a descendant of the Firefox 3.6.9 that an N900 user installed from extras-devel in 2009.
That is the whole chain: the browser you get on a Jolla 2 today is the 2025 build of the engine that an N900 owner chose in 2009, and the 16 year gap between those 2 dates is the length of the Maemo lineage. The N900 is no longer a device you can buy, the 256 MB of RAM is no longer the spec that constrains web design, and the 3 ports that defined its browser era are no longer downloadable, but the browser question that started in the N900 forums is still being answered, in the settings of a phone that ships in 2025.