Mobile Firefox hits first beta

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 18 Mar 2009 at 10:48

The mobile version of Firefox, dubbed Fennec, has just hit its first beta, bringing a slew of important features.

According to the developers behind the mobile browser, the principal improvements over the early alpha releases revolve around performance.

"We've done heavy optimisations to our frontend code and made a number of optimisations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth," writes Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter on his blog.

"We've also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work."

The beta is also notable for the introduction of the TraceMonkey javascript rendering engine, which has been the bane of the desktop team since December, but which should significantly improve the performance of Java-intensive applications.

Other important features include the activation of plugins, allowing users to watch embedded videos on webpages, and support for bookmark management and folders.

Though these improvements may sound rudimentary, the Fennec team noted that early development was focused on "adding touch screen support and other interactions appropriate for mobile phones" rather than traditional features.

The beta, then, also represents a shift in priorities for the team, with future releases further refining the feature set and polishing the interface.

"One of our main focuses for the next milestone will be on polishing the user interface - areas like the extension manager will get a face lift and we'll start working more on some of the usability issues people have reported," Parmenter adds.

While Fennec sounds promising it's currently only usable on Nokia N810 internet tablets.