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 N8x0. “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 N8x0, 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.

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.