Browsers on Maemo
The N900 browser was MicroB, Nokia’s own browser built on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, and it shipped as the stock browser of Maemo 5 when the device arrived in November 2009, with Opera Mobile, Firefox and an unofficial Chromium port available afterwards as alternatives.
Four browsers is an unusual number for a handheld of that generation, and the reason is the packaging model rather than any deal with a vendor: because Maemo was Debian-based, a browser was just another .deb, and anyone able to compile one could publish it. The hardware they all had to fit inside is described under The Nokia N900, and the catalogues they arrived through are covered in What you could actually install.
MicroB, the stock Gecko browser
MicroB was the stock browser of Maemo 5 and it ran a real Gecko engine, the same rendering core Mozilla used on the desktop, wrapped in a Hildon interface with a Nokia-written front end. Running a desktop browser engine on a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 with 256 MB of RAM was genuinely unusual in 2009, and it is the single fact that made the N900 browser worth talking about: pages rendered as their authors intended rather than as a cut-down mobile engine guessed at.
Two capabilities followed from the engine choice. MicroB shipped with an Adobe Flash Player plug-in at a time when video on the open web still depended on it, and it accepted a subset of Mozilla add-ons, so ad blocking and script blocking were available on a phone years before that was ordinary. The trade-offs were equally direct: a heavy page could exhaust physical memory and push the device into its 768 MB swap file, and the browser had no answer for that beyond closing windows.
Opera’s return to Nokia’s Linux tablets
Opera returned to Nokia’s Linux tablets after roughly three years away, and the absence is the part most people have forgotten. Opera was the built-in browser on the Nokia 770 and the N800, and when Nokia moved to the Mozilla-based MicroB with the OS2008 release in late 2007 the Opera engine left the platform altogether. Opera Mobile came back for Maemo 5 during 2010, as a separate download from Opera rather than as anything Nokia shipped.
What Opera Mobile offered against MicroB was speed under memory pressure and Opera’s server-side compression, which mattered on a data plan and on a 3G connection that was frequently neither. What it lacked was the plug-in and add-on surface that made MicroB interesting. Most N900 owners kept both installed and picked per site.
Firefox for Maemo, Mozilla’s first finished mobile browser
Firefox for Maemo was Mozilla’s first finished mobile browser, released for the N900 in January 2010 under the codename Fennec, which makes the N900 the device that got a final Firefox mobile release before any Android or iOS handset did. It shared the Gecko engine with MicroB but not the interface: Mozilla built a touch-first design with the controls hidden off-canvas to either side of the page, reached by dragging.
Mozilla continued Maemo builds into the Firefox 4 development cycle and then stopped, redirecting mobile effort to Android. That is the ordinary shape of every alternative on this platform: an engine vendor supported Maemo while Nokia’s own commitment lasted, and moved on when it did not.
The Chromium port and the smaller WebKit browsers
The Chromium port for Maemo was community work, and Google never released Chrome for the platform. Volunteers packaged Chromium builds into the Extras-devel catalogue, where they installed and ran, and where their appetite for RAM met a device that had 256 MB of it. The port is worth recording as a demonstration that the packaging model allowed it, not as something anyone browsed with daily.
Two smaller WebKit browsers filled the middle ground. Tear was written for Maemo 5 specifically, and Midori came across from desktop GTK Linux with little modification. Both were lighter than MicroB and both were incomplete against it.
| Browser | Engine | Origin | Status on Maemo 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MicroB | Gecko | Nokia, using Mozilla technology | Preinstalled, the default |
| Opera Mobile | Presto | Opera Software | Official, separate download |
| Firefox | Gecko | Mozilla | Official, discontinued after Firefox 4 era |
| Chromium | WebKit, later Blink upstream | Community port | Unofficial, from Extras-devel |
| Tear, Midori | WebKit | Community | Unofficial, from the catalogues |
What actually worked on a 2009 handheld
What actually worked on a 2009 handheld was decided by memory and by the screen, not by the browser’s feature list. The N900 gave a browser a 3.5in 800×480 resistive display, 256 MB of RAM backed by 768 MB of swap, and a 600 MHz processor, so a desktop-width page fitted at the cost of text small enough to need zooming, and three or four heavy tabs open at once pushed the device into swap and made it visibly slow. Charging mattered too: sustained browsing over 3G drained the 1320 mAh battery fast enough that heavy web use was a mains-tethered activity.
Two practical habits followed. Owners kept a light browser installed for quick lookups and the stock browser for sites that needed the full engine, and they avoided using a web map in the browser when a dedicated mapping application did the same job with far less memory, as set out in Maps and navigation. None of these browsers came through Nokia’s storefront, which carried a different sort of catalogue entirely and is covered in The Ovi Store.
From MicroB to the Sailfish OS browser
MicroB’s line did not end with Maemo, and the Sailfish OS browser is where it continued. Sailfish, built by Jolla on the Mer fork of the MeeGo core after Nokia left the project in 2011, ships a browser that also embeds Gecko, using the Qt embedding work that grew out of the same effort to run Mozilla’s engine on constrained hardware. The interface is entirely different; the engine choice is the same one Nokia made for the tablets.
Sailfish OS is still shipping, on Jolla’s own hardware and on selected Sony Xperia devices through the licensed Sailfish X programme, alongside unofficial community ports to other Android handsets. This site does not carry operating system images, ports or firmware of any kind, and it is an independent reference rather than Nokia, Jolla, maemo.org or the original Maemo Freak blog.