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Mobile Firefox Alpha 1 Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Oct 17, 2008 01:55 PM
from the smaller-better-deal dept.
Mozilla The Internet Handhelds Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Today Mozilla released development builds of its next mobile browser, Fennec 1.0 Alpha 1. 'The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface. We really want to get Fennec in front of as many people as possible and get feedback.' To that end, Fennec has been made available for the desktop on Windows, Mac and Linux."
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  • OS X Intel Only (Score:4, Informative)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Friday October 17 2008, @01:58PM (#25415329)
    The OS X version is Intel only. This probably won't affect most of you, but it does kinda suck for those of us still on PPC machines.

  • More Standard compliant? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Skifreemonster (1388187) on Friday October 17 2008, @02:20PM (#25415615)
    Fennec scores higher on the Acid3 test than Firefox 3.0.3. Well at least running on a windows PC

  • Minimo2 (Score:3, Informative)

    by SlashdotOgre (739181) on Friday October 17 2008, @02:32PM (#25415773) Journal
    I'm curious to see how this performs on a real mobile device compared to Minimo [wikipedia.org]. Wikipedia seems to indicate it's being pushed by the same developer, Doug Turner. I was never able to get even runnable performance out of Minimo, but there's definitely a market for a better mobile browser. I just updated my Q9m to WM 6.1 and Pocket IE is still garbage. The other alternatives like Skyfire & Iris show potential, but they are not there yet.

    • Re:Minimo2 (Score:4, Informative)

      by Colonel Korn (1258968) on Friday October 17 2008, @02:51PM (#25415967)

      I'm curious to see how this performs on a real mobile device compared to Minimo [wikipedia.org]. Wikipedia seems to indicate it's being pushed by the same developer, Doug Turner. I was never able to get even runnable performance out of Minimo, but there's definitely a market for a better mobile browser. I just updated my Q9m to WM 6.1 and Pocket IE is still garbage. The other alternatives like Skyfire & Iris show potential, but they are not there yet.

      Opera Mobile's not a bad browser at all.

  • Posting from Fennec in Windows (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SlashdotOgre (739181) on Friday October 17 2008, @02:46PM (#25415897) Journal

    So far it seems pretty interesting, although there's definitely bugs (eg. my text disappears when I'm not typing a character), but hey it's an alpha. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes, although the interface is not geared towards Windows Mobile Smartphone, it seems to be best suited for a touchscreen at the moment.

    On a side note, I didn't see any interface to specify a proxy, but I was able to set one through about:config. I have to go through an auto proxy so I just set the autoconfig_url to the URL of my proxy and the network.proxy.type to 2.

  • This is really very interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Millennium (2451) on Friday October 17 2008, @03:34PM (#25416557) Homepage

    The minimal UI would be perfect not just for mobile phones, but for other small-screen devices (I'd use it on my eee, for instance). This is obviously not the core market for Fennec, but I'd love to see an extension which added back just a few "desktop/laptop" conveniences:

    • Keyboard shortcuts, at least for Back, Forward, Reload, Open Location, Find (and Find Again), Print, Cut, Copy, and Paste.
    • Scrolling around in pages, not just vertically but also horizontally.
    • Some means to highlight, cut/copy, and paste.

    Again, I'm not necessarily saying these should be folded into the core Fennec distro; "full" computers aren't its main market. But an extension would be nice.

  • N810 users beware. (Score:3, Informative)

    by supernova_hq (1014429) on Friday October 17 2008, @04:14PM (#25417297)
    I've tried installing this a couple times on an N810 (last week) and both times it completely messed up xulrunner. Couldn't remove it, update it, reinstall it, nothin'. If you are planning on testing it on an N810, make sure you are prepared to backup and flash if necessary (I was still able to use the device after xulrunner died, but my other browser, microb stopped working).

  • Just installed it on my n800 (Score:3, Informative)

    by dbc001 (541033) on Friday October 17 2008, @04:54PM (#25418055)
    The one-click install didn't work, but the step-by-step instructions worked fine.

    It seems to run pretty slow. Can't seem to enter any text into the address bar.

    Disabled Javascript and now I can enter a URL - not sure if that's related.

    It needs a lot of work (it is an alpha) but it's exciting that they've gotten this far.

  • Back and forward buttons hidden, why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by guest (3772) on Friday October 17 2008, @05:15PM (#25418359)

    It seems like a big mistake to hide the back and forward buttons, the buttons that users are frequently going to want to use. I'd much prefer that they hide the Bookmarks button and put the forward and back buttons on the main screen so I can get to them without having to move the screen to the left first.

    • Re:Windows Linux Mac. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dolda2000 (759023) <fredrikNO@SPAMdolda2000.com> on Friday October 17 2008, @01:59PM (#25415355) Homepage
      Indeed, that's exactly what the summary said. They made it "available for the desktop", "to get Fennec in front of as many people as possible".

    • Re:Windows Linux Mac. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Friday October 17 2008, @02:02PM (#25415399)
      No, those aren't mobile platforms. But if you'd read the page, you'd see that they're making these available to help get the widest number of users to provide feedback re: the interface, as well as making it available for people to begin developing plugins for it. Of course, that will probably also lower the S/N ratio re: valid feedback.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by J05H (5625)

        especially stupid considering Symbian S60 makes up well over half of the smartphone market worldwide - 64% last time I checked. Not that you'll notice this if you live in the States, land of Blackberry and iPhone, but it dominates the EMEA and APAC markets - I've been using several S60 phones from Samsung and Nokia for a few months for testing and they frankly blow everything else away in terms of usability (holy crap it's a PHONE FIRST), interface design (clean and extensible) and as convergence devices.

        On

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