Firefox for mobiles beta released

Posted on 18 Mar 2009 at 13:00

Mozilla has released a beta version of its mobile web browser. The open source browser, dubbed Fennec, promises faster and smoother performance than other mobile browsers.

"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," said Fennec developer Stuart Parmenter. "We've also been able to improve startup performance."

The browser supports touchscreen handsets as well as traditional mobile phones. Mozilla has introduced support for plugins to let you stream videos on the web, which the alpha release did not have.

Fennec incorporates the "awesome bar", a feature from Firefox that allows the browser learn about your habits and adapt to your preferences over time. Mozilla said that the beta release is "for testing purposes only", and is already working on improvements for the next beta.

"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," said Parmenter.

Author: Dawinderpal Sahota

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