Firefox mobile ready to go
Although it has been slow to come to the party the Mozilla Foundation’s Fennec mobile browser is now just weeks away from its first major release. Called Fennec, the name for a small nocturnal fox, the browser is a stripped-down Firefox browser built with mobile touch screens in mind. The Fennec interface is simple and clean with an address bar across the top of the screen and the rest of the space is dedicated to the browser. The menu system is largely hidden from users until they need it.
Like Firefox, Fennec is lightweight and streamlined so there are very few “extras”. Instead, the Fennec team has developed an extensions framework which will allow users to add additional capabilities to the browser, just as they do with the desktop version of Firefox. Adding Fennec extensions will be done from within the browser, just as with Firefox, and promises to be Fennec’s major advantage over competing mobile browsers, as many of the thousands of existing Firefox extensions will be trivial to port across.
Initially Fennec will only be available for specific Nokia devices and those mobile phones running Windows Mobile version 6 but it is expected to be more widely available in the near future.
Interface shift
The first thing when you open Fennec is the simple and clean layout. There is the address bar across the top of the screen and the rest of the space is dedicated to the browser.
The address bar is designed along the lines of Firefox’s so-called “awesome bar” which responds as soon as anything is entered into the address bar. So entering a few letters gets Fennec searching its history and bookmarks to find matching items. This is useful on Firefox and even more so on a mobile phone on which you don’t want to be doing too much unnecessary typing.
To cope with the smaller screen space, Fennec zooms and scrolls just like other popular mobile browsers so users can choose between a full view of the page or a zoomed-in version.
The one thing that is different about Fennec is the horizontal design which needs a left or right swipe to reveal the various control buttons. The back, forward, favorites and settings buttons are on the right-hand side, while thumbnails of open windows are on the left hand side.
Right at the top of the right hand bar is jigsaw icon which is used to bring up the “add-ons” manager just as in Firefox. Right now there are a limited set of extensions available for Fennec but users can expect many more in the months following the launch of version 1.0.
Tabbed browsing
In the left-hand bar there is Fennec’s version of Firefox’s tabbed-browsing. The bar contains icons of all pages already open as well as a “plus” icon to open a new tab. Helpfully, each tab has a close button attached to it so you can close any existing window without having to actually open it.
Version 1.0 of Fennec is expected to be released before year’s end.
Firefox Mobile aka Fennec – comments and views
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