Firefox has announced that Fennec, it’s mobile internet browser, has reached the beta phase. Along with the beta, which is intended to acquire feedback from the Mozilla and developer communities, Mozilla has announced many of the current and updated features from the early alpha.
New for Beta 1:
- TraceMonkey – Mozilla’s JavaScript engine, allowing Fennec to better handle Java
- Faster application start-up time
- Browsing improvements – Faster panning and zooming
- Bookmarks – implementation of bookmark folders and bookmark editing
- Support for plug-ins – mostly for watching embedded videos on webpages
According to the developers, these improvements are primarily aimed at improving Fennec speed and performance. The beta is currently only usable on Nokia N810 tablets.
Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter says “We’ve done heavy optimisations to our frontend code and made a number of optimisations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work.”
What we think?
None of the announcements above sound all that amazing on their own. They are the basic requirements for an operational mobile web browser. However, the development philosophy for Fennec revolves around making a browser that is uniquely mobile based. Rather than simply port the on-line web onto mobile devices, the idea is to create a browser that fits mobile devices. It’s a market that’s getting pretty crowded now, with Bolt and Skyfire making moves and the copy-and-paste release from iPhone 3.0 earlier this week. Given the popularity of Firefox world-wide, it’s possible that when Fennec is ready for release it’ll be serious competition for the iPhone and OperaMini.
