Fennec (Mobile Firefox) Alpha 1 Release!

[wellofsouls]

http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2008/10/...perience-alpha/

Fennec - M9 (User Experience Alpha)

October 16, 2008 at 10:38 pm ? Filed under Mobile, Mozilla

Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 9, which is also our first alpha! We?re calling this release the User Experience alpha. 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.

As with the previous milestones, M9 is targeted at the Nokia N800/N810 (Maemo) Internet tablet. Yes, we have made great progress on Windows Mobile, but no milestone releases yet. However, in addition to the native Maemo release, we are also releasing desktop versions of Fennec. That?s right, you can install Fennec on your Windows, OS X or Linux desktop too! We want you to be able to experiment, provide feedback, write add-ons and generally get involved with the Mozilla Mobile project, even if you don?t have a device.

The release notes have information on a quick start, how to install, what?s new, known issues and how to provide feedback. So if you?re interested in getting involved with Mozilla Mobile, install Fennec and tell us what you think.

Update: We noticed that the desktop builds had the mouse cursor turned off. This is good for touchscreen devices, but bad for desktop applications. We flipped a preference and updated the desktop builds. If you downloaded a desktop build and have the cursor problem, just download the build again, it?s been fixed.

Release Notes

Windows Build

Mac OS X Build

Linux Build

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

For Alpha 1 it's pretty good, I'd like to see it on actual hardware instead of a window on my mac/pc though.

I like how it tries to scale the page to fit the screen width, unfortunately that can break on some sites and it cuts off part of the page. Another issue is that images can get lines through them when you scale the page, but this happens in any Gecko 1.9 browser, image snapping just isn't very good, here's hoping bug 458487 lands soon.

Edit: Took this screenshot a while ago, may as well use it.

Edited October 17, 2008 by The_Decryptor

[wellofsouls]

the interesting thing is that Fennec is basically just a pure xul shell that runs on top of xulrunner, so it will continue to be able to run on desktop as well as mobile platforms.

[redeemed]

Wow thanks for the heads-up. I was kinda hoping this would be for windows mobile :( :/, but that will come soon enough. :)

[wellofsouls]

After some time, I think the "dragging" thing is quite awkward, it's great in concept, but in execution it's just strange...