Mozilla's mobile Firefox browser, which is codenamed Fennec, is now available for Windows Mobile. Mozilla has released a pre-alpha test build of the Windows Mobile port for users who want to get an early look at the program. This release is designed to work on an HTC Touch Pro and might not work yet on other devices. I was unable to run it on my HTC TyTN II.

The Fennec project aims to bring the Firefox experience to mobile devices. Although Mozilla's browser has historically been too resource-intensive to take on the mobile market, the work to reduce memory overhead for the Firefox 3 release and ongoing efforts to improve the browser's JavaScript performance have finally made it a viable option on handhelds. We got our first look at Fennec last year when an early prototype was released. Mozilla followed it up with an alpha release that showcased Fennec's new finger-friendly user interface. A second alpha, which was released in December, included significant optimizations that improved the browser's responsiveness and brought it a step closer to being a practical option for day-to-day use.

Those early releases all targeted Nokia's N810 Internet Tablet device, which runs the Linux-based Maemo platform. A Windows Mobile port was being developed in parallel, but this is the first time that a version of Fennec has been officially released for Microsoft's platform. Patches to facilitate Windows Mobile support for the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR)—the browser's underlying platform portability layer—have been merged into Mozilla's main source tree, making it possible to compile the Windows Mobile port directly from the trunk.

The release is distributed as a 9MB CAB installer which you can download from Mozilla's FTP repository. It includes a mobile version of XULRunner which is used as Fennec's runtime. The port is still at an early stage of development, but the availability of a Windows Mobile version demonstrates Mozilla's commitment to bring the browser to a wide range of handsets across multiple platforms. Mozilla has also committed to building a Symbian port.

"This release is prealpha, and intended to get the product into the hands of early adopters in order to get feed back and bug reports," said Mozilla mobile developer Brad Lassey in a blog entry. "In order to focus our efforts on getting this release out, we have targeted only one device, the HTC Touch Pro. This has a number of user interface implications, including graphics designed for a 300 dpi screen, control layout intended for a vga screen and reliance on a hardware keyboard for text input."

There are several other pieces that are not yet in place. Lassey says that the update system isn't functioning yet and support for plugins has been disabled. Fixing the plugin feature is a high priority for the team, he says.

Tough competition

The mobile browser market is highly competitive and there are some compelling alternatives to Fennec that are already available for Windows Mobile users. Opera has done great things with Opera Mobile 9.5, which delivers a Web browsing experience that almost rivals the iPhone and has some interesting additional features such as support for the W3C Web widget standard. Another alternative that has a lot of potential is SkyFire, a mobile browser that leverages sever-side Gecko rendering and provides excellent support for streaming video. Even Microsoft is gearing up to deliver a decent mobile browser to replace its disgracefully useless Pocket Internet Explorer.

Fennec offers several key advantages over the rest of the pack, but the most significant is its extensibility. Much like Firefox on the desktop, Fennec is designed to support third-party extensions that can increase the functionality of the browser and enhance the user interface. In our previous reviews, I looked briefly at some of the first major extensions, including one that allows users to post messages to Twitter through Fennec's URL bar. Far more impressive examples have emerged now that the platform has had an opportunity to mature. Developer Felipe Gomes recently published a video that demonstrates an experimental gesture-based control system for Fennec that is implemented as an add-on, much like the mouse gesture extensions available for the desktop version of Firefox.

Mozilla is making excellent progress on Fennec and is already software that exceeds my expectations. It's being used experimentally in some creative ways and has a lot of potential. When it matures and becomes compatible with additional devices, it could become a major force in the mobile Web ecosystem.

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