20 March 2009

Mozilla Launched First Beta
Version Of Firefox Mobile Browser

Couple of months ago, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, has rolled out an "alpha" version of Fennec, the long awaited mobile version of the Firefox their very popular desktop browser.

Yesterday, Mozilla has officially announced that Fennec has finally reached Beta development stage.

The first beta version is hardly consumer ready, curently it is only is available for Nokia's Linux based Maemo platform (Nokia N810 Internet Tablet), and there are plenty of bugs and interface challenges to iron out.

However, there is a hope that fully backed Fennec mobile browser could be ready to run on consumer smartphones by the end of the year for Windows Mobile and S60 devices.

The newest version brings more finger friewndly user interfac, support for plug-ins, and also increases the application start-up time and page-rendering speeds.

Fennec now featuers "awesome bar" which acts as both navigation and search bar. Start typing in a URL or search term and it auto-suggests web pages based on your past Web surfing habits. Various searches, including Google, YAhoo Answers, and Wikipedia, are one click away via links at the bottom. The browser also remembers all your passwords, just like Firefox. It supports Flash.

The initial focus of Fennec development was on building a new user experience that reflects Firefox's design principles, adding touch screen support and other interactions appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices, while preserving leading features like the Smart URL Bar ("awesome bar") and support for add-ons.

For beta 1, we continued to focus on performance and responsiveness. TraceMonkey, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine, is now included in Fennec, greatly improving performance. Many other performance improvements were made to panning, zooming, responsiveness and application start-up, some of which are listed below.

To help out, visit the Mozilla mobile page to learn about our public weekly meetings, how to find our community on IRC, and more.

These Release Notes provide a "quick start" for the impatient, some highlights of what's included in this version, download and installation instructions, known issues, and frequently asked questions. Please read these notes and the bug filing instructions before reporting bugs to Bugzilla.

If you are not an owner of the latest Nokia internet tablet, the first beta release is also available for PC machines as well. The idea behind releasing the package for PCs is to give people who don't have a Nokia Internet Tablet the ability to localize, experiment and build add-ons.

I know it sounds kind of cliché but Firefox mobile is based on the same core as the Firefox 3 and will 'bring a true web experience to mobile phones and other mobile devices' according to the foundation. It will also allow users to easy migrate user data like cookies, bookmarks, forms data, and various other information from their desktop browsers to their mobile devices.

A mobile version of Firefox would compete with versions of Opera and Internet Explorer and would adopt the same desktop feel as its desktop cousin - if the goal of demonstrating that 'mobile' is part of one, unified, open web" is anything to go by.

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