Mozilla releases the next major version of its Firefox browser for mobile users ?ö?ç?? known as Fennec ?ö?ç?? for Android and the Nokia N900.
Mozilla has announced that the next major version of its
Firefox browser for mobile users, known as Fennec, is now available for the
Android and Nokia N900 platforms.
Mozilla officials said the Alpha release of Fennec is now
available for Android and Nokia N900 users to
download and test.
In
an
Aug. 27 blog post, Stuart Parmenter, director of mobile engineering at
Mozilla, said Fennec is the first mobile browser to offer add-ons and is built
on the same technology that powers desktop Firefox. The latest version of
Fennec builds on the rich set of features from the previous release and makes it
easier to bring your Firefox experience with you anywhere, he said.
Lauding the openness of Android, Parmenter said this first Alpha release of
Fennec for Android is "an exciting first step in bringing browser choice
and customization, along with a seamless Web experience across devices, to a
leading open mobile platform. Now, developers have the power to use the latest
Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and
JavaScript to
build fast,
powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach many millions
of devices."
And as with the latest update of the Firefox 4 beta for the
desktop, "Fennec Alpha now creates one fluid Web experience between
desktop and mobile devices by providing
Firefox Sync built into the
browser, which provides seamless access to Awesome Bar browsing history,
bookmarks, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs," Parmenter said.
Describing the key points in this alpha release, Parmenter
said:
"The main focus of this release is to increase
performance and responsiveness to user actions. This is being implemented using
two major technologies, 'Electrolysis' and 'Layers.' This Alpha release
includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate
process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to
react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive
JavaScript is running. The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of
Layers to greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like
scrolling, zooming, animations and video. We're also working to optimize these
actions using the hardware-accelerated graphics rendering capabilities showing
up in today's mobile devices."
Meanwhile, on Aug. 24 Mozilla announced the
latest
update to the Firefox 4 beta, which included Firefox Sync and Panorama,
formerly known as Tab Candy. With a single keystroke, Panorama provides an
overview of all a user's tabs to easily organize the tabs into groups, name
them, prioritize them, and quickly switch between tabs or tab groups, Mozilla
said.
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