As some people know, in my day to day job, I work on QA on various Firefox related projects. Mostly, I work as the QA lead for our security releases but I have also been working on the Mobile Firefox (aka “Fennec”) project in between these releases. Mobile browsing has become more and more important over the last few years as cell phones and other mobile devices have become more powerful. It is as important for people to have options there that support an open Internet as it is for their main personal computers. This is especially true since so much of the world is moving in the direction of primarily using the Internet by means of mobile devices without the use of a desktop or laptop.
Fennec has hit a nice milestone today. As Brad mentions on his blog, Alpha 1 is available for Windows Mobile now. This is a big step as we’ve only previously shipped versions for Nokia’s Maemo platform based on Linux. Given the installed based of Windows Mobile for cell phones, the amount of people able to try out Fennec has gone up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Brad gives instructions on his blog for installation but I wanted to include Madhava’s video below demonstrating Fennec on Windows Mobile. I’ve been quite pleased with our switch to a CSS-based user interface in the last two weeks. There is a lot of work ahead but this is a big step.
I also want to call out to Joel Maher and Clint Talbert for their excellent QA work on this Alpha. They’ve been working like crazy on this for a while.
Fennec – alpha 1 for Windows Mobile from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.
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