The Mozilla Blog

The Mozlla mobile team has released Fennec 1.0 beta 4 for Maemo. This release brings noticeable improvements the user experience and UI of the browser. Specifically you’ll see:

• Improved touch-friendly theme
• Improved panning and zooming performance and behavior
• Add search providers from the site identity panel
• Manage search providers from the Add-ons Manager
• Simplified the Download Manager (removed searching and find file on disk)
• Streamlined the bookmarking process
• Simplified the bookmark management
• Popup notification when background tabs open
• Bookmark list now displays the URL and tags associated with a bookmark
• Added a product information page (about:fennec or use the button in Preferences)
• Support for add-ons options in the Add-on Manager
• Support for updating add-ons
• Support for the HandheldFriendly meta-tag (support for the viewport meta-tag is coming)

You can find more information on Mark Finkle’s blog, Mozilla’s mobile developer and platform evangelist.  The team has also spent time making sure Fennec runs well on Nokia’s N900 device.

Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the availability of Fennec Alpha 3 for Windows Mobile. The release brings lots of great features and fixes, including improved start time, panning, compositor work, and support for a wider range of screen resolutions. For more details, see Brad Lassey’s blog post, excerpted below, or see the release notes or a cab installer here.

The first thing you’ll notice is the improved start up time. Brian Crowder took Vladimir Vukicevic’s original dabblings for Firefox on Windows CE and produced a cross platform fast start daemon for Mozilla… One caveat is that this faster start up time doesn’t take effect until after you reboot your phone (hey, this is Windows after all).

The next thing you’ll probably notice is the much improved panning. We’ve implemented a tile cache rendering system (much like you see on Google maps) that allows us to cache previously rendered content and avoid duplicating the work.  This has also allowed us to switch over to native scrolling surfaces which has greatly improved panning performance. Roy Frostig goes into much greater detail on this in his blog post on the tile cache.

Also helping out panning performance has been Robert O’Callahan’s compositor work, which reduces the amount of native widgets we have to deal with when rendering or scrolling and a change to keep track of the invalidated regions ourselves rather than rely on the system do it.

As for what’s next, Brad notes:

There is plenty more work to do (after all this is an Alpha release), but in writing this blog post I realize just how much progress we’ve made since Alpha 2. I hope you’ll give it a try, put it through its paces and enjoy. Oh, and file bug reports.

Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo!   Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s director of mobile engineering, explains more about the exciting new features and improvements to performance in his blog post, excerpted below.

We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes.  A lot of work has been done to make our theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release.  Overall, this beta is a major improvement to previous Fennec betas.

Moving forward, we’re going to focus on fixing polish bugs, rough edges, and taking advantage of things like our new tile system to help avoid the user seeing a checkerboard while panning.

For more information, check out the developer release notes.

Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the release of two milestones for the Fennec project – Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. Additionally, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s mobile team technical lead, highlights some of the exciting new features in his blog post, excerpted below:

For these releases we have worked on improving the user experience, replacing our old theme with a much nicer looking one and fixing numerous usability issues. We’ve continued to increase performance and responsiveness. We’ve revamped how you install Add-ons, improved our download manager and the whole look of the application. We’ve started work on making forms on web pages easier to use, providing a nicer combo box UI than before.

For more details visit Stuart’s post. Congratulations on these milestones!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Fennec 1.0 beta 1 on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:37 pm PT. We’ve excerpted from Stuart Parmenter’s blog about the milestone below. You can read the full blog post here or find out more by reading the release notes.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend 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 startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta.

On the feature front, we’ve enabled plugins so you can now watch videos on your favorite sites, and we’ve got in our first pass at improved bookmark management and support for bookmark folders. A lot of time was spent on infrastructure that we could use to build the rest of our app with. You’re now able to scroll things like preferences and the new bookmarks list. 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.

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced the release of Fennec alpha 2, an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, on Monday, December 22, 2008.  See Engineering Manager Stuart Parmenter’s comprehensive post for more details, excerpted here:

We’re happy to announce that our second alpha release of Fennec has come together.  While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we’ve spent much of the time since focused on improving performance.  We’ve made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading.

The release notes have information on a quick start, how to install, what’s new, known issues and how to provide feedback. So if you’re interested in getting involved with Mozilla Mobile, install Fennec and tell us what you think.

Congratulations to the entire mobile team!