Fennec, Mozilla's Mobile Browser, Arrives in Alpha for Windows Mobile

by Sam Dean - May. 18, 2009Comments (1)

We've written before about Fennec, Mozilla's innovative open source mobile browser. For quite a while now, Fennec has been in beta testing on Maemo-enabled Nokia Internet Tablets, but now there is an alpha version available for testing on Windows Mobile 6. It should put the pre-release browser in front of many more people, even though it is intended for developers and testers. You can find a download link and installation notes here. There is also a video of Fennec for Windows Mobile here, which is definitely worth watching.

The video demo of Fennec for Windows Mobile shows several early concepts that Mozilla had for its mobile browser in action. In particular, what's centrally displayed on the browser is complemented by tabs and controls that are off-screen. You scroll to the left and to the right to get to these. Tabs are lined up in a column on the left, while bookmarks and page-turning tools are off-screen to the right. The idea behind this is is to get away from the tiny browsing metaphors found on most mobile phones. Fennec also auto-adjusts for different screen sizes, and shares Firefox's memory management library.

 

The version of Fennec shown in the demo looks pretty complete, and I'm guessing we'll see a finished version of it arrive by the end of this year. That could really shake up browsing on smartphones and other mobile devices, especially if development of extensions for Fennec takes off.


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Jesse Babson uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



1 Comments
 
Chrome started out with so much of a bang, yet they have not been heard from lately. I did see an ad by them on Hulu, though. Wonder if they will be available on mobile platforms soon.
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