Mozilla Goes Mobile: Fennec Rears its head
Posted in browser by admin on October 20th, 2008 Late on Thursday evening the company that created the world’s second-favourite browser, Mozilla Corp. revealed its mobile version – code-named “Fennec” – taking the unusual step of offering it in version for desktop PCs and Macs, in order to collect feedback.
In-Keeping with the fox theme – a Fennec is a small fox that lives in the Sahara desert – the browser is built from the same Gecko code that drives the currently under-construction Firefox 3.1.
Mozilla announced the Fennec browser as “an early developer release” that was suitable for “resting purposes only” – they always say that for pre-betas, and according to Mark Finkle, the company wants as much feedback as possible.
To help reach the biggest amount of testers, the browser is available not only on the Nokia N810 Tablet, but is available for desktops and laptops running Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Finkle made the announcement on his blog:
“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 Nokia N810 is not a mobile phone, but is actually more similar to an iPod touch. It runs the Maemo OS, which is based on the Debian Linux distro.
A Windows Mobile version of the Fennec browser is currently being built, but is not yet available for public testing.
Fennec offers touch-screen functionality, includes a pop-up blocker, a Firefox-style tab-browsing interface, a password manager, and the same address bar features that made Firefox 3 such a hit.
Mozilla is rather a latecomer to the mobile browser party. The Opera browser is certainly the best mobile browser out there at present and works on a range of handsets. Apples iPhone uses its own Safari browser.
However, this is not the first attempt by Mozilla to break the mobile browser market – the company’s Minimo was dropped back in November.
Check out Fennec Alpha 1 at Mozilla’s web site.
