Mozilla has made available for download a new development milestone of its open-source browser project for mobile phones. Testers are now free to grab Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo straight from Mozilla, with the mention that the bits are from a pre-release version of the product and, as such come with inherent issues, this despite the fact that Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s director of mobile engineering, referred to Beta 3 as a major improvement over past Fennec Betas.

“Fresh from the factory, we’re happy to announce Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo to the world! This release features major improvements to performance and a fancy new theme. We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes. A lot of work has been done to make our theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release,” Parmenter explained.

With the third Beta for Fennec 1.0, Mozilla is looking to build on existing tester input by harvesting even more feedback from early adopters. At the same time, Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 is an integral part of an engagement effort aimed at all Mozilla community teams, from localizers to testers, but also a way to get Web developers to test drive the release, and an invitation extended to developers to adapt current add-ons or build new ones for the mobile flavor of the open-source browser.

Essentially, Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 comes to the table with overhauled scrolling, which delivers a boost in speed. At the same time, Mozilla revamped the major visual theme for the browser and expanded the tile caching abilities. Beta 3 also enhances kinetic panning with directional locking, according to Mozilla, and will offer users a new level of quality for zooming support, while allowing them to navigate iframes via scrolling.

“We’ve changed quite a bit under the hood to make things faster including putting in place a tile-based rendering system to cache the areas of the page you’ve been to. Moving forward, we’re going to focus on fixing polish bugs, rough edges, and taking advantage of things like our new tile system to help avoid the user seeing a checkerboard while panning,” Parmenter added.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Windows is available for download here.
Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Linux is available for download here.
Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Mac OS X is available for download here.