Firefox for Windows Mobile images surface

Filed under: Mozilla, Open Source, Browsers, Mobile

Firefox for Windows Mobile images surface

by Brad Linder Oct 11th 2008

We've known for a while that Mozilla was working on a mobile version of Firefox. In fact, you can already download early builds of the web browser, codenamed Fennec, but at the moment it will only run on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.

But Mozilla says a Windows Mobile version of Fennec is on its way and that an Alpha release could come within the next few weeks. And now a few screenshots have surfaced which would seem to indicate that at least someone is already running Fennec on a Windows Mobile phone.

If the screenshot on the left looks rather crowded for a mobile browser, it's important to keep in mind that Fennec works in full screen mode most of the time. The location bar, tab menu, and even forward, back, and reload buttons are all designed to disappear when you're not using them. But Fennec does seem to take an interesting approach to tabbed browsing by presenting thumbnails of open pages, which seems both useful and like a potential waste of processing power on mobile devices.

One of the screenshots visible at the::unwired shows Fennec's score on the Acid3 test. The results? An 88. Not perfect, but not bad for a brwoser designed to run on a cellphone or PDA.

Tags: acid3, fennec, firefox-mobile, windows-mobile

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Damian said 8:20PM on 10-11-2008

Fennec layout engine is simply a slightly patched version of 1.9.1 Gecko branch, which is currently scoring 89/100 with no page visual bug (like the x in the top right corner of that screenshot). There are 'tryout' builds of Firefox which score 97/100 for the Acid3 test, so this is probably the upper limit for the score Firefox will get in version 3.1 and hence the upper limit Fennec will probably have for when its alpha stage.

Damian said 8:09AM on 10-12-2008

Oh also, in the 1.9.1 branch, tab previewing has almost no performance impact. Thanks to the the new MozAfterPaint event ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450930 ) it'll only redraw the part of the screen that has changed.

So unlike extensions in Firefox 3 which can have some small performance impact because they monitor DOM mutations, which presumably performance would of been worsened on the mobile, don't expect to see much difference with or without this feature.

Evenio said 11:34AM on 10-12-2008

Hey, they shouldn't feel too bad about an 88 as long as they're working on it. The current version of MobileSafari gets a 74.

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