Mozilla Releases Firefox for iOS Preview in New Zealand

Mozilla announced Thursday that it will begin rolling out the first public preview version of the Firefox browser for iOS in New Zealand. With the preview, Mozilla is starting to deliver on a promise it made in May this year: Firefox on any platform in any language.

The open source organization writes this on its blog. With the preview version, Firefox is coming to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. This first public preview is to “gather feedback in a country” before the creators add more countries where residents can download and try the preview version. It is not yet known when the final version of the browser should be released.

The feedback round should also help build new features that iOS users want that are still missing in this browser preview. Existing features include Intelligent Search, which makes suggestions for search results and allows you to choose between different websites to enter searches on.

With the arrival of Firefox to iOS, it is also possible to synchronize different Firefox browsers with Firefox Accounts. The iOS version also includes the ‘visual tabs’ option, with which an overview of the various open tabs can be obtained.

Although Firefox can’t use its own render engine within iOS due to restrictions on Apple’s part, the development team hopes to bring the full Firefox user experience to the OS. For those interested, the code of Firefox iOS is also on Github.