Fennec, Mozilla's Mobile Browser, Enters Beta

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.betanews.com/article/Mozillas-mobile-browser-experiment-finally-enters-beta/1237391331' target='_blank'>http://www.betanews.com/article/Moz...beta/1237391331</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"It's looking more and more like Mozilla is ready to really do this: Late last night, the organization posted the first public beta of the browser that could end up being "Firefox Mobile." It still goes by the code name Fennec, and the first beta is testing whether touchscreen mobile users will be willing to have literally all their browser functions be placed off-screen, if it makes room for more elements of the Web page."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/ppct/auto/1237394045.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>What I find interesting - and impressive - is that Fennec is going to have TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine that will come with Firefox 3.5. Usually mobile components tend to be stripped down, pale shadows of their desktop counters - it's nice to see the Mozilla developers putting performance at the forefront. Right now the beta is only for desktop Windows, which surprises me a little bit - you'd think that the beta stage was when they'd be ready to do the on device testing after the desktop testing in the Alpha stage. Still, I'm thrilled to see Fennec starting to gain some momentum - with the continued fumbling by Microsoft in getting a great mobile browser into the hands of its customers, it's nice to see another option coming for us to use.</p>

[MichaelA]

<p>Right now the beta is only for desktop Windows, which surprises me a little bit - you'd think that the beta stage was when they'd be ready to do the on device testing after the desktop testing in the Alpha stage.</p>

There is a mobile version -- for the Nokia n8xx internet tablet. It's definitely better than the alpha version they released months ago, but it seemed to lag loading some sites so I'm not ready to switch from the standard n810 browser. At least they sped up the interface quite a bit, and the functionality available with the touchscreen is interesting.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/1.0b1/releasenotes/

[MichaelA]

Also, an earlier release appears to have been available for the HTC Touch Pro for the past month:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blassey/2009/02/10/fennec-milestone-release-for-windows-mobile/

[whydidnt]

Unfortunately, the latest version on my N810 is awfully slow rendering pages. A couple of times I thought the device locked up, but it was just slowwwwly rendering the page -- very desktop like rendering though.

My current favorite WM browser is Iris. Being based on Webkit, you can see and feel the resemblance to Safari on the iPhone. I've found it quite usable, and I'm really hoping that we'll see a reasonably sized WM device with US 3G and a 3.5"+ VGA screen sometime this year. I'm thinking that, combined with Iris would move me back to WM as my daily driver, of course by then iPhone 3.0 will be out and that will address a LOT of my current gripes with that platform -- but still no multi-tasking is problematic.

The great news is browsers like Firefox, Opera, Skyfire, and Iris and really starting to mature, and the competition is forcing all of them to improve quite quickly. This makes using the browser on WM MUCH more useful.