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I bet you’d like to be among the first to get touchy-feely with the new browser that has just invaded the territory of mobile phone browsers which is widely talked about. Mozilla released the first public preview of its mobile browser, the Firefox for Mobile alpha code, dubbed Fennec, and took the unusual step of offering it in versions for desktop PCs and Macs to collect feedback.

The name comes from the Fennec Fox, a small fox that lives in the Sahara and is notable for its huge ears. As far as the browser is concerned, it’s based on the same Gecko code base that drives the also-under-construction Firefox 3.1, which just hit Beta 1 last week.



On Mozilla’s official website we’re told that this is just an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox and aims at testing purposes only, such as to get wider community feedback on the approach to the user experience, to engage Mozilla community teams, including localizers, add-on developers and testers and to get feedback from Web developers.



The development was focused until now on building a new user interface that gets along with Firefox’s design principles and adds touchscreen support and other features that are adequate for mobile phones and other handheld devices. The idea is to do more alpha releases which will be meant to test performance, including projects like TraceMonkey, speculative parsing and many Fennec and Gecko optimizations. Anyways, the reason why this early release is now available is to continue to grow the community and gather feedback as early as possible in the development process.



The bad news is for all of you out there who don’t own Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet, because the code will only be available for these fortunate ones. So, the first alpha release is available for the OS2008 (“Maemo”) software platforms that runs on Nokia N810. The Nokia N810 is not a cell phone, but rather is a small device for browsing the Internet, similar in some ways to Apple Inc.’s iPod Touch. But if you don’t have the specific device, you can still experiment with Fennec, provide feedback and write add-ons by installing a version of Fennec for your desktop PC: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux. According Jay Sullivan, Mozilla vice president of mobile, there will likely be two or three additional alpha releases over the coming months before the beta version is released, presumably sometime in 2009.



As previously reported, the alpha Firefox for Mobile includes the “awesome bar” which was first introduced in Version 3.0 of desktop Firefox. You shouldn’t expect a complete replica of Firefox’s Awesome Bar to show up on your mobile phone, but do expect something close enough to save you typing time. The bar is a vastly smarter URL box that can be used to do keyword searches of your URL history and bookmarks. That’s also a key innovation to make a mobile browser easier to use, by minimizing manual input.

As I said it before, Fennec uses the same core HTML rendering engine, Gecko, that’s found in desktop Firefox with full JavaScript capability and AJAX (a set of tools and features for building interactive Web applications). Gecko is also used in the ThunderHawk mobile browser, and the browser Nokia developed for the N810 tablet.



The alpha version supports fingertip touch interaction with the browser designed to use the full device screen for content, with the control buttons and URL bar hidden but easily uncovered with a single swipe of your finger. The Nokia tablet supports direct touch and use of a stylus, according to Sullivan.

Mozilla’s team knows very well the fact that most people want to stream video from their mobile phones and having Flash is therefore a must. The official answer on this one is that Fennec will support a plugin API, which means that as long as Adobe and others give the green light, you’ll be able to play YouTube videos via Firefox’s mobile browser.



One of the Fennec’s goals is to carry over as much as functionality from Firefox 3 as possible. This early version features a password manager that offers to save and auto-fill your logins. In addition, the browser debuts with pop-up blocking and the familiar logo to the left of the search bar that serves up the identity of the Web site owner. More than that, Fennec support add-ons and some of them have already been created.

Now, if you’d like to see what Mozilla is planning for the mobile phone browsers world, you can grab a copy of Fennec alpha 1 from the official website of Mozilla.



(Source phonearea.net)