Firefox for Mobile – ‘Fennec Alpha’

So the Mozilla foundation have a new browser, aimed at mobile. It’s excellent news that we will have another browser entering into the marketplace soon.

Mobile web browsers are the first point of call for internet users in developing countries in Asia and Africa, truly giving people means to live and connect with family and business contacts. The mobile is also the first internet experience for many handset owners in India. There is a deeper penetration of the internet using mobile than desktop in these continents.

Fact: 306 Million mobile users in India 2008, with 610 million in 2012.

Mozilla’s main competitor will be Opera Mini, “the world’s most popular mobile Web browser with over 20 million users”. In some countries Opera mini is shipped on handsets; this will only increase in the next 12 months.

People’s desire to access the internet using a mobile is increasing, but can the infrastructure cope with this demand? We need to be sure before the “flood gates” open and the innovation increases.

It is very early days for Mozilla’s Fennec. As with most alpha releases, and being open sourced, it means that testers and developers will contribute ideas, bugs and fixes to the latest version.

View a video featuring a quick introduction to Fennec Alpha 2 Overview .

Being in alpha stage, it’s intended as an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, for testing purposes only, intended to:

• get wider community feedback on our approach to the user experience
• engage Mozilla community teams, including localizers, add-on developers, and testers
• get feedback from Web developers

The focus of development so far has been on building a new user interface that reflects Firefox’s design principles, and adds touch screen support and other features that are appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices.

Download the latest build of Fennec here – www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/

What does this mean for iPhone users?

Apple’s SDK restrictions means that browsers running scripting languages will not be allowed, and not on Android either. Currently this is the only way that Firefox will work on the iPhone.

In other browser news, Opera has demonstrated Opera Turbo at Mobile World Congress, showing up to 3.5 times faster than other browsers not using the turbo technique. Users will experience faster page downloads because Opera Turbo generates less HTTP requests. Each request introduces a lot of latency, which is a common problem with mobile networks. Read the full article here

This article at Business Insider describes recent browsers allowed on the App Store. The update section explains that they’re all Webkit-based.

So while Apple now seems to be allowing apps that are marketed as browsers, there’s still no evidence they’ll let in other browsers like Firefox, which use competing browser engines – a key technical difference. So we still don’t know if they’d allow other browser flavors, or browsers with add-ons built in like Adobe Flash. The consensus from commenters seems to be “probably not.”

[Update from Matt: Mozilla has joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation in fighting for jailbreak iPhone users to install non-Apple approved third-party apps]