Fennec sees pre-alpha release
Written by Shawn Ingram on February 12th, 2009 in News.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile, Web, Web Browsers
If you’re on the Internet for very long, chances are you extensively use or have at least heard a lot about Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It runs on almost every machine possible and Mozilla is expanding its efforts to yet more machines. In its first public pre-alpha release, Fennec, the Windows Mobile version of Firefox is available, for some people at least.
The new release is targeted towards the HTC Touch Pro, mainly to focus their efforts on making the browser more stable as a whole rather than having to work around the hardware of all the WinMo phones that are out there. Even now, it doesn’t have the support it will have later in development. There’s no extension support, touch screen keyboard is disabled and all updates have to be manually installed. But, for a pre-alpha release it seems reasonable.
After waiting so long for some sort of public release for Fennec aside from the developer builds, it’s refreshing to finally this pre-alpha release. Though it is for a WinMo device, there are plans to bring the browser to Linux-based mobile OSes and Symbian. As long as there’s enough push behind it when it does see an official public launch, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes off immediately.
Given the option, I’m sure most of us would agree to use Firefox over Internet Explorer, and that will most likely be the same on mobile devices as smartphones increase in popularity. If you have an HTC Touch Pro, while it might be a bit buggy, I think it’d be interesting just to see how Fennec is shaping up and possibly contribute a bit to the effort by reporting any bugs.
Read [Mozilla Blog]
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