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Mobile Firefox Alpha 1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Today Mozilla released development builds of its next mobile browser, Fennec 1.0 Alpha 1. '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.' To that end, Fennec has been made available for the desktop on Windows, Mac and Linux."
...are FAGS.
None of those OS's are really mobile platforms. Well they are an arn't.
Windows Isn't.
Linux can be but stripped down to the bare bones.
the same with OS X.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's some typo in the headline. Or at least, I'm assuming that it's supposed to be "Fennec", and not "Firefox". I'm a bit impressed that that got through.
The OS X version is Intel only. This probably won't affect most of you, but it does kinda suck for those of us still on PPC machines.
This guy's the limit!
Hey that's pretty cool. I have never used the interweb before until today and i can go to websites and post comments about random crap. i already looked at 8 porn sites, downloaded some viruses, and hacked bank accounts. now i can do it all from my cell phone?! AMAZING!
I'm really interested in trying Fennec on my actual mobile device. Oh well, I'm glad to see they're making progress.
Is she illin in the panicillin?
Is she chillin in the panicillin?
Is she stealin in the panicillin?
Is she feelin in the panicillin?
Panka panka
Is she liable no suitifiable pliable style is so suitifiable
Is she liable no suitifiable im not on trial but its suitifiable
Is she reliable no suitifiable not just viable but real suitifiable
Is she try-able no suitifiable lying in the aisle im real suitifiable
Is she spillin in the panicillin?
Is she squealin in the panicillin?
Is she feelin in the panicillin?
Is she trillin in the panicillin?
Panka panka
Is it libel? no suitifiable pliable style is so suitifiable
Is it a style? no suitifiable im not on trial but its suitifiable
Is it a mile? no suitifiable not just viable but real suitifiable
Is it wild? no suitifiable lying in the aisle im real suitifiable
I'd like to see a version for the iPhone, although I'm sure Apple would never let it see the light of day.
Slashdot traffic again brings down another blog.. For our next trick can we try the whitehouse.gov website?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
And, in classic slashdot style, the site is dead before I make it there.
Fennec scores higher on the Acid3 test than Firefox 3.0.3. Well at least running on a windows PC
Are the firefox plugins going to work for fennec ?
It would be great if adblock plus would work !
Is it available in the App Store?
Or is Fennec solar powered? That would explain the ears.
Installed Fennec onto my N800 (OS2008). Slow as hell. I didn't think anything could be slower than MicroB, but they've done it. Plus you can't trigger the text input fields, I'm assuming they think everyone has an N810 with the built in keyboard.
Can't load gmail (which they even do in their example video). Sits and spins, and pops up a warning saying that a script is making Fennec unresponsive. Oh well.
Having said that, if you can get it to actually load and render a page, it does it really fast.
Switching between the name and title when you edit the name/title widget is nice, but it means if you want to copy the name of the page you won't be able to select it.
At least I couldn't find them in the preferences page.
I'm curious to see how this performs on a real mobile device compared to Minimo. Wikipedia seems to indicate it's being pushed by the same developer, Doug Turner. I was never able to get even runnable performance out of Minimo, but there's definitely a market for a better mobile browser. I just updated my Q9m to WM 6.1 and Pocket IE is still garbage. The other alternatives like Skyfire & Iris show potential, but they are not there yet.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
And of course a RHEL4 desktop won't run it, wrong glibc version. When will people learn, either package it properly for a small set of distros or static link everything like netscape used to do.
Democrat delenda est
The linked article is already Slashdotted due to "exceeding bandwidth" or some such thing. No surprise there as it's a blog.
Going to the official Firefox site and searching for "fennec" matched nothing. Yea! With it being so easy to get, I'll be trying it "real soon now".
So let me get this straight. I'd like Chrome (beta) for the desktop on Linux and OSX and can't get it, but I can get Fennec (alpha), a mobile browser, running on my desktop w/ Linux and OSX.
So far it seems pretty interesting, although there's definitely bugs (eg. my text disappears when I'm not typing a character), but hey it's an alpha. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes, although the interface is not geared towards Windows Mobile Smartphone, it seems to be best suited for a touchscreen at the moment.
On a side note, I didn't see any interface to specify a proxy, but I was able to set one through about:config. I have to go through an auto proxy so I just set the autoconfig_url to the URL of my proxy and the network.proxy.type to 2.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I really want to be able to run adblock, flashblock, and no script to keep my screen from being overtaken with adds on sites that don't have a mobile version... or even on those that do.
Of course, how can this be considered mobile without Palm listed. Pffft!
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/1.0a1/releasenotes/
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
Is it another kind of panda?
The minimal UI would be perfect not just for mobile phones, but for other small-screen devices (I'd use it on my eee, for instance). This is obviously not the core market for Fennec, but I'd love to see an extension which added back just a few "desktop/laptop" conveniences:
Again, I'm not necessarily saying these should be folded into the core Fennec distro; "full" computers aren't its main market. But an extension would be nice.
Neat-o. I'll have to install this on my slate-style Tablet PC; It's a fun toy, but you never realize how much you middle-click-for-new-tab until you can't any more.
I've sort of worked around it with Tab Mix Plus to open _everything_ in new tabs, but something more touchscreen centric would be nice.
--saint
I'm impressed, my site works in it. While my web site validates and works in every desktop browser, not a single mobile browser so far (Pocket IE, Symbian browser, Opera Mini) supports it, but Fennec does.
I do have to say I'm not a fan of the back and forward button being hidden however.
I've tried installing this a couple times on an N810 (last week) and both times it completely messed up xulrunner. Couldn't remove it, update it, reinstall it, nothin'. If you are planning on testing it on an N810, make sure you are prepared to backup and flash if necessary (I was still able to use the device after xulrunner died, but my other browser, microb stopped working).
Windows mobile devices have the largest share of the market, why release it for a few specific nokia models if they want the largest number of users giving them feedback?
The desktop release don't count, desktop users will install it run it twice, think "ohh that's cute" and never run it again.
How about those of us stuck with pocketIE and opera's offerings both of which fail miserable on something as simple as a redirect.
My long-developed XUL application is completely screwed, the functionality in Fenek is at 30% maybe. For example, main menu doesn't work, image onclick event can't popup menu (or popup menu doesn't work at all?), all comboboxes are missing (but textboxes are there), mouse scroll button in tree doesn't work (cause it zoom the whole page), and now it completely crashed. While considering my last bugreport with MINIMAL TEST CASE was submited and completely ignored for 5 months, I think it's time to move on.
The one-click install didn't work, but the step-by-step instructions worked fine.
It seems to run pretty slow. Can't seem to enter any text into the address bar.
Disabled Javascript and now I can enter a URL - not sure if that's related.
It needs a lot of work (it is an alpha) but it's exciting that they've gotten this far.
It seems like a big mistake to hide the back and forward buttons, the buttons that users are frequently going to want to use. I'd much prefer that they hide the Bookmarks button and put the forward and back buttons on the main screen so I can get to them without having to move the screen to the left first.
pw:secret
Opera Mobile's not a bad browser at all.
Yes it is, try any extended use on symbian S60v3 platform like Nokia E90 communicator and you'll see why. Frequent crashes (even the whole phone reboots), pages loaded only after n times of clicking the link, wrong keyboard maps, incorrect rendering of web pages (yes, that includes slashdot).
It's only good in one way: quite fast.
90/100
acid3.acidtests.org
All I want for xmas is a WebKit browser.
The standard web browser for the N800/N10 devices is MicroB, which is based on Gecko and it's a royal piece of crap. It's VERY slow, buggy, non-intuitive, and lacking most of the standard features of any modern desktop browser. The only redeeming quality is that it does Javascript and Flash just as well as Firefox but of course orders of magnitude slower. With Nokia acquiring Trolltech, I figured we'd see a good WebKit-based browser around the corner, but the Nokia developers still seem married to Gecko. Nokia needs to completely rework Maemo from the ground with Qt and Wekbit if they ever want to create a decent user experience.
I downloaded Fennec onto my 2.6GHz deskop and my 320MHz MIPS N800. On the desktop, performance seemed to be about on par with Firefox (that is to say, decent but not great) and at 9MB, it's even about the same size. On the N800, it was completely unusable. It took almost a full minute to load and going back and forth between tabs and controls was painful. Scrolling pages sucked too.
I know it's still in alpha, but unless they can trim the size back by at least half and increase performance at least tenfold, it still will not be a viable solution until phones and Internet tablets start shipping with 1GHz processors. Gecko is just not a solution for embedded browsers.
Nokia needs to take Apple's lead and release a WebKit-based browser for their tablets and phones. WebKit is plenty fast, standards-compliant, stable, and above all, proven. The only thing my N800 does particularly well is download and play podcasts. I'd love to be able to actually use it as an Internet tablet.
... could use Fennec right now. :-)
"Converged mobile device shipments (S60 phones) were 15.5 million (down from 16 million in Q3 2007) including 9 million Nseries and 3 million Eseries devices."
This comes from Nokia only. There are many other vendors producing Symbian handsets. When Symbian becomes open source and free, you may even see it on current J2ME "dumb" cheap phones.
As Opera did the unimaginable by not releasing Opera 9 beta for Symbian and now enjoying Windows Mobile bug reports rather than their own issues and as I remember Mozilla released a Windows Mobile version one time, I am just saying... Don't do same mistake again.
Unless Apple tells you privately that they will make it possible to release a full feature browser on iPhone, don't spare a byte of coding to it too.
Point is: Don't ignore Symbian. Especially for currently unrealistic iPhone or MS controlled Windows Mobile.
Just because Opera doesn't run on your favorite platform doesn't make it a bad browser. If it does run on a platform, it's excellent. Obviously there's a problem with your platform of choice which causes Opera to bug out. It works fine on other platforms.
Clever signature text goes here.