Mozilla releases early beta of Firefox for mobile devices

It's currently codenamed Fennec.

This is an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, for testing purposes only, intended to:

  • get wider community feedback on our approach to the user experience
  • engage Mozilla community teams, including localizers, add-on developers, and testers
  • get feedback from Web developers

The focus of development so far has been on building a new user interface that reflects Firefox's design principles, and adds touch screen support and other features that are appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices. We plan to do further alpha releases which focus on performance, including projects like TraceMonkey, speculative parsing, and many Fennec and Gecko optimizations. But in the meantime, we feel it is important to make this early release available to continue to grow the community and gather feedback as early as possible in the development process.

Of particular note: You can install a version for Windows to see how its coming along.

Looking good, though I'd argue that the address bar area is way too big right now. I assume that will auto-hide.

Thanks to Sebastian V. for the tip.

Discuss this Article 8

tayme
on Feb 11, 2009
Why would I want to install a mobile browser on a PC running Windows, OS X, or Linux. What good is that? The input mechanism is not even remotely the same as it is on an iPhone, WinMo, or gPhone device. Can somebody explain this to me??? --tayme
Waethorn
on Feb 11, 2009
"Why would I want to install a mobile browser on a PC running Windows, OS X, or Linux." For the same reason why they have Windows Mobile and iPhone emulators for their respective related desktop computing platforms.
RobertC
on Feb 11, 2009
Fennec is pointless at the moment. It appears to be designed solely for the Nokia Internet Tablet N810 which is a total waste of time given that the N810 has negligible market share. Why no alpha version for Windows Mobile or Symbian was created is a mystery to me.
tayme
on Feb 11, 2009
I suppose that webdevs could see how their pages render and such... --tayme
subzerohitman721
on Feb 11, 2009
My question is why did Mozilla wait so long? The delay gives other mobile browsers time to clean up their game.
Dipsh t Admin
on Feb 12, 2009
And I guess they can complain about the bundling of IE on WinMo and Safari on the iPhone, right? Robert, the N series line of Internet tables has been dropped by Nokia. Designing for such a device would be futile. Maybe this is more geared towards the MID market. Although Archos is going to be running Android on their new Internet tablets.
Dude1313
on Feb 12, 2009
I for one can't wait for a Firefox for the mobile space.
pepitoe
on Feb 12, 2009
Dipsh t Admin, only the Wimax version of the N810 has been dropped, the standard N810 is still available, and Nokia is working on a new device and updated OS for release later this year.

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