Firefox mobile still lagging
The mobile version of Firefox’s browser, called Fennec, is still only available for the Windows Mobile and Maemo platform, a soon-to-be redundant operating system only used on a couple of Nokia devices. Despite Mozilla’s insistence that Firefox Mobile will be available for a wider range of mobile devices, including Android, there is little evidence of this progress.
Over the past year the Fennec developers have spent most of their time preparing Fennec to run on Nokia’s Maemo operating system and in February released version 1.0 for phones such as the N900. In the same month Nokia announced that it was joining with Intel to create Meego and was merging Maemo and Intel’s Moblin operating system. Much of the code that runs on Maemo will presumably be portable to Meego but it is still a miniscule market.
In the meantime Google’s Android OS for mobile phones is picking up speed and is now one of the most popular platforms in the mobile sector.
Similarly, the iPhone is widely used but neither of these has been the focus of an official release by the Fennec development team. While a Fennec browser for the iPhone is unlikely anytime in the future, an Android one is very likely, eventually.
Originally Mozilla said it wasn’t interested in building Fennec for Android because the platform didn’t allow for running native applications, a similar reason for not developing for the iPhone. Applications on Android had to be run on a version of Java – known as Dalvik – which was largely seen as unsuitable. Even James Gosling, founder of Java, said that Google’s version of Java was “odd”.
Google did eventually release a software development kit for Android which allowed applications to run natively on the operating system, although it warned that there would be some limitations. Since then a number of Android-based phones running Fennec have been seen in the wild, although an official version is not yet available.
There are, however, preview versions available of the mobile browser that can be tested on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. These versions can be downloaded from the Mozilla site and include the full Fennec experience.
Among those is the URL bar which dominates the top of the screen and includes the Firefox “awesome bar” feature which auto-complete urls for you. The browser includes the ability to open multiple tabs at once and these are accessed by dragging across the screen from the left to the right. Doing the opposite opens the bookmarks and settings panels.
One of the options missing in the first previews of Fennec back in 2008 was the add-ons menu. The item was there but didn’t actually do anything This time around there are a number of add-ons that can be installed on Fennec including Mozilla’s Weave synchronisation tool and the ever-popular Ad-Block extension.
Initial testing using the desktop-based version suggests Fennec is capable and feature-rich.
And while it looks likely that Android will eventually get its own version of Fennec it probably won’t be in the next few months so Android users will have to do with Android’s own browser or opt for the likes of Opera Mobile.
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