Open Source

Fennec – Firefox for mobiles

We love Firefox on our desktops and now there is Firefox for our mobiles – called Fennec. Fennec is a web browser for mobiles (phones, PDAs and small screen tablets) released by Mozilla. As of this writing, it is in Alpha 1.

Fennec Alpha 1 is available only for Nokia N810 tablets running Maemo. But I own a Windows Mobile. Fortunately, Fennec is downloadable for Windows, Linux and Mac desktops – for users (like me) to see its glimpse, test it and give feedback.

I downloaded the Linux version from here. Extracted the archive (tar -jxvf fennec-1.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2). This produced a directory named fennec.  Changed to this directory and launched Fennec by issuing ./fennec.

With the aim not being a full fledged review of Fennec (since it is in alpha), following are a few noteworthy features:

Awesome bar: Like Firefox 3, Fennec shows the earlier visited sites as you start typing in a URL. It shows the URL and title of the sites. This allows you to quickly jump to the URL without much typing:

Optimizes Website’s dimension: Seems Fennec tries its best to horizontally fit a web page to the viewable area. A website can be scrolled vertically by dragging the mouse from bottom to top.  Following is how my Blog looks in Fennec:

Tab browsing: As hinted on the first launch screen, drag the mouse, to the right, on the Fennec window and you will see the tabs panel. It shows the preview of all the currently open tabs as shown below:

You can launch a new tab by clicking on the + button or remove a launched tab by clicking on the – button on the tab preview. Fennec automatically launches a separate tab for links which open in a new Window.

Back, forward and favourite buttons: Dragging the mouse towards the left reveals the typical web browser button for Back, Previous and Bookmark/Favourites.

Configuration/Preferences: Clicking on the wheel button (at the bottom), shown in the above screenshot, reveals the browser’s configuration or preferences option. But I was not able to select or change any option. Either I’m doing something wrong or it is the Alpha factor.

Remember password: Fennec showcases the same non-intrusive remember password prompt – as in Firefox 3 and Google Chrome. The remember password prompt is displayed on the top without stopping the subsequent (to the login) page from opening:

I browsed through GMail (non mobile version) using Fennec and found it to working fine. This means Fennec will be supporting JavaScript and AJAX intensive sites.

Miscellaneous:

• Fennec claims to support plugins and addons with several plugins like that for Java, Quicktime and DivX listed. But even after enabling them I could not see Java applets or Quicktime videos.
• It seems to remember the data filled in form fields too and displays a small popup above the fields to assist in prefilling
• Flash based websites did not work. There were no Flash plugins listed
• While not a Fennec’s issue, Websites (like mine) are not detecting Fennec as a mobile browser. The user agent string emitted by Fennec (while running on a Linux desktop) is as follows:
  

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081015 Fennec/1.0a1

Note that Fennec is not the first mobile browser from Mozilla. Earlier Mozilla had released a web browser called Minimo. Minimo is now found in the Mozilla archives. This means Fennec is the way forward. I had used Minimo on my earlier mobile which was a Windows Pocket PC (running Windows Mobile 2003). Minimo also supports tab browsing.

Fennec is said to use the Firefox’s design principles and the Gecko engine and hence I’m calling it the Firefox for mobiles. I’m not sure if Fennec and Firefox share the same code base.

Last but not the least, I played with Fennec on a Linux laptop with a mouse, keyword and a large screen. How well it works with a phone’s input and output devices can be told by someone who owns a Nokia tablet. It will also be interesting to see how the future versions of Fennec behave on smaller screens of mobile phones and PDAs.

Waiting eagerly for the WIndows Mobile version of Fennec …

Fennec - Firefox for mobiles, 10.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating
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© 2008 Shekhar Govindarajan’s Blog.