There are three main options that I've seen for
web browsers on the
Nokia N900, which is the flagship
Maemo product. Two of the browsers are based on
Mozilla's
Gecko layout engine while the third is based on the
webkit layout engine.
The
MicroB web browser is probably the first that any Maemo user comes across. It's the default browser, based on Gecko, and is a continuation of the line of browsers on earlier
Nokia Internet tablets. Of the three browsers, it's the most
hildonized, feeling most at home on the platform. It uses the same status-bar slide-in to call-up customization options and
Maemo notifications as the rest of the platform. It has some stability issues, however, and is internally the least consistent. Areas of the browser that are less common, such as extensions and plug-ins, did not get the hildonzied appearance resulting in needing to use an old-fashioned scroll bar.
The
Midori web browser is the second option. It's based on the same rending engine as
Mobile Safari and the
Android's web browser. It renders about the same, and has built-in support for
user-agent spoofing so that sites treat it just like if you were using an
Apple iPhone mobile device instead of the higher-resolution N900. There are some rendering differences, which I haven't quite figured out the cause of given that they do both use the same underlying engine. Midori also has shown some odd behaviours, like forgetting about touch-scrolling at one point until it was restarted.
Finally,
Mozilla Fennec, the code name for the mobile version of
Mozilla FireFox. While MicroB supports limited ad-ons and extensions, Fennec is a mostly-compatible version of the desktop FireFox browser and supports many of the same ad-ons. The UI work that went into customizing Fennec for the N900 is impressive, and it does feel very natural. With that said, there are a few things I miss from MicroB, such as the "swirling" magnification. Fennec has only a double-tap that changes from zoomed-in to zoomed-out (somewhat reminiscent of
Opera Mini's "map" feature), but does not allow one to continue to zoom in like MicroB does. On the other hand, some may find that double-tapping as a toggle makes zooming through a page quicker than MicroB which continues to zoom in on each double tap.
The summary report is that I'm using a combination of the three. With many sites wanting to
treat everything as an iPhone, I use Midori in iPhone-spoofing mode to see what sites consider their
superior mobile presentation, and am trying Fennec for most normal browsing right now, mostly because of its support for tabs which MicroB lacks (but Midori does have).