Firefox Mobile Browser Fennec: Complete Features List

The fox remains but it has gone cuter. Yes you guessed it right. The most popular browser in the world gets a new species of its own kind, Fennec - mobile version of Firefox browser. The testing is still limited to  Nokia N810 tablet. But don’t you worry.Stressing more on platform independence, desktop computers running Windows, Mac OS, and Linux all will compatible to run it on its own. Other improvements, according to the Mozilla release notes, include tabbed browsing, integrated Web search (built into the address, or awesome bar), access to multiple search engines, and both bookmarks and tags.

I’m super-happy to announce the first beta release of Fennec for the Maemo platform. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our front-end code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve start-up performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work.

wrote Stuart Parmenter, mobile architect for Mozilla.

Key Goals

The overall goals for Mobile Firefox are:

• Provide Mozilla’s standards-based open-source browser engine, optimized for mobile, that can be embedded by device manufacturers and others;
• Full-featured mobile browser including support for XUL-based add-ons, delivering on Firefox’s key principles of ease-of-use, security and accessibility;
• Grow the Mozilla community in the mobile space
• Provide tools and documentation to help developers develop, debug and deploy web applications;
• Do all of this work in the shared Mozilla source repositories so all platforms, desktop and mobile, benefit each other.

What About Add-Ons?

As news.yahoo tells us

In addition, like the desktop version of Firefox, Fennec permits the installation of add-ons that can extend the capabilities of the mobile browser. Not surprisingly, only a limited number are available right now, but testers are already playing with add-ons to access Twitter, fix typos in URLs, and enhance security.

Reviewers have also praised the new browser’s intuitive handling of menus, bookmarks, auto-fill for URLs, and other features drawn directly from its desktop big brother.

Features

Mobile Firefox gets some of the most basic features. Still let me put them for you.

• UI modes
• mouse pointer for non-touch screen devices
• zoom
• scrolling/panning
• Security (e.g. how does the user know the site is secure?)
• Tabbed browsing
• Spatial navigation
• keyboard shortcuts
• Layout
• Viewport meta tag
• Installers for Linux (Debian?), Windows Mobile
• Virtual keyboard
• Password/input manager + native integration
• Low memory handlers
• Device integration through Javascript
• Determine build profile (simple, basic) and what needs to be removed/added
• radical new UI

Some of the new ones that you may love are

• Weave Synchronization
• Handheld media type attribute
• User-agent discussion - what are we?
• Auto-suggestion of mobile site (suggest that a load to cnn.com goes to mobile.cnn.com)
• GPS Integration.
• tel: support
• mail link support
• Ad block / image block
• Scroll bar support

So that is it for now. We will be updating you as soon as you get latest reports. Meanwhile, if you can try and test Fennec from here.

• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Linux

Oh, very surprisingly, there is no talk of compatibility with iPhone yet. We hope it will be sorted out sooner. Okay, enough of talks, I will leave you with a running version of Fennec mobile browser that we tried in our desktop