about:mozilla » Mobile

First Mobile Firefox Alpha released

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:21:00 +0000

Mobile Firefox (code-named Fennec) has reached its Milestone 9 release, which is also its first alpha. The team is calling this the “User Experience alpha”, and is targeted at the Nokia N800/N810 internet tablet. While great progress has been made on Windows Mobile, it is not ready for general use and is thus not included in this release. There are, however, new desktop versions of Fennec available, meaning you can now install the mobile browser on your Windows, OS X, or Linux desktop to see what all the fuss is about (and to help with testing and feedback, of course).

The Fennec Alpha 1 release notes include information about how to get started, how to install the browser, what’s new in this release, a list of known issues, and how to provide feedback. If you’ve ever been interested in getting involved with the Firefox Mobile project, now is a great time to install Fennec, watch the walkthrough video, and get started.

Mobile Firefox: User Experience developments

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:40:31 +0000

Mobile Firefox (code-named “Fennec”) recently hit its milestone 8 (M8) release. Mark Finkle blogged about the release at the time, and Madhava Enros has since blogged about the user-experience changes and additions to the mobile browser. “This is an exciting time from a user-experience perspective because, along with functionality and stability improvements, this milestone brings with it the beginnings of Fennec’s look and feel. In a sense, we have some UI worth playing with, evaluating, and improving.” Madhava’s post includes a bevy of screenshots that you can check out, and if you would like to take part in the discussion about the Mobile Firefox UI, you should do so over in the Mobile development group.

Mobile Firefox: Milestone 8 released

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:12:59 +0000

Mark Finkle posts that Fennec (the code-name for Mobile Firefox) has reached a milestone 8 (M8) release, which you can install and test on a Nokia N8×0. “One of the big improvements during this milestone was the addition of several Mozilla QA team members. Fennec is being tested pretty hard now, and by people who love to find bugs. We are finding and fixing lots of issues now. Probably the biggest visible change in M8 is the new theme. It’s not entirely landed yet and will likely get some tweaks as we iterate on the design.” The post goes on to talk about some upcoming changes for Fennec. “Although Fennec is still only targeted for the Nokia N8×0, that should be changing fairly soon. Work on Windows Mobile has heated up quite a bit.” For more information, including a list of M8 highlights, see Mark’s full article.

TraceMonkey and Firefox Mobile

deb — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:12:30 +0000

Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukićević has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.

Skinning the Fennec

deb — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:26:34 +0000

Madhava Enros and Sean Martell have been working on creating a default theme for the Fennec web browser (”Fennec” is the code name for Mobile Firefox). Madhava writes, “We’re trying for something that nods back in the direction of Firefox on the desktop while still striking out in a direction that’s appropriate for a small-screen finger-directed device. [Sean]’s posted some recent work to his blog, and he’ll be posting more there as we go. This is an effort still very much in progress, so please jump in with your suggestions. There’s a Fennec UI discussion thread ripe for contribution.” For more information and some mockups of the theme, see Madhava’s blog post.

Mobile Firefox, now with add-ons

deb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:34:15 +0000

The recent release of Fennec (the code name for Mobile Firefox) Milestone 7 included the revolutionary addition of an Add-ons manager for the mobile browser. Mark Finkle has written a detailed post that talks about developing add-ons for Fennec, explaining its various similarities and differences to Firefox. “Fennec is a XULRunner application and gives extension developers access to the same underlying XPCOM system that is used in Firefox. The process of building extensions is the same as for any other Mozilla based application.”

There are significant differences, as well. “Fennec is not Firefox. It is a completely different application. Fennec’s UI is also very different than Firefox. This means you can’t just plop a Firefox (or Thunderbird or Songbird) extension into Fennec and expect anything to work. There are some basic things an extension developer will need to handle when making or porting extensions to Fennec.” These differences include: a different application id, a very different XUL UI, and different JavaScript objects and functions in the UI code among other things.

Mark suggests that currently the best way to figure out what’s available is to look at the source code. If you have questions, jump into Mozilla IRC’s #mobile channel, and someone there should be able to help you out. Mark also includes some example Fennec extensions, which you can find linked in his blog post.

Mobile Firefox “Fennec” Milestone 7 released

deb — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:28:59 +0000

The Mozilla Mobile team has announced that “Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 7 (M7) and can be installed on a Nokia N8×0 for testing. We got some good feedback (and bug reports) from M6, so there are more than a few bug fixes in M7. Other additions include better add-on support, initial kinetic scrolling, modeless password manager, and some zooming tweaks. Please take Fennec M7 for a spin and file some bugs.” The Mobile team has posted install instructions and the M7 Readme. You can read the full release announcement at Mark Finkle’s weblog.

Firefox Mobile design session: bookmarks

deb — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:33:45 +0000

Aza Raskin writes, “For the third installment of the Firefox Mobile design discussions, it’s bookmark time. Bookmarks have been a fundamental feature in the browser since Mosaic days. Do they have a place in Mobile? Are there better paradigms? How are they displayed? What’s the difference between a tab and a bookmark? Is it only a matter of one being in the device’s memory?” These are some of the questions that are asked and answered in the third video installment of the Firefox Mobile design sessions. Aza and Madhava look forward to your thoughts and feedback. More information is available at Aza’s weblog.

A glimpse into the Mobile Firefox design process

deb — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:25:12 +0000

Aza Raskin writes, “Designing at Mozilla is an interesting process: We are committed to doing design in the open and involving community in a fundamental capacity, yet we must avoid design by committee. For the latest round of user experience iterations for Firefox Mobile, Madhava Enros and I are recording our discussion sessions. It’s an experiment, so I have a couple of questions: 1) is this a useful thing to do — do you find value in seeing our unfiltered face-to-face meetings, and 2) in what ways could we make it more valuable to you?” Aza and Madhava have posted two videos so far: Preferences, Add-ons, and Downloads in Fennec, and In-page Find in Fennec. They’re looking for feedback, so if you have anything to add, leave comments on the blog posts.

Fennec M6 available

deb — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:39:28 +0000

The latest about:mobile newsletter reports that the latest milestone of Fennec — Mozilla’s new mobile effort that is in the early development stages — is now available. “We’ve made the sixth milestone release of Fennec. Fennec M6 includes a couple of major features. It has initial support for a tab-like interface, support for ‘mailto:’ and ‘tel:’ urls, and some stability fixes vs. M5.” More information is available in the release notes, and Mark Finkle has written a post about this latest release.