14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla announced today the release of the fourth alpha flavor of their mobile browser for handsets powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, namely Fennec. According to the company, the mobile solution is based on the same browser engine as the desktop Firefox 3.6, though it features great changes under the hood, and with intensive optimizations for mobile phones.
“These key design principles are at the heart of the browsing experience: minimize typing, let the Web have center stage, and personalize your browser, to name a few. Fennec 1.1 alpha 1 for Windows Mobile includes some of your favorite features including the Awesome Bar, Weave Sync, add-ons, and Location-Aware Browsing,” the company states.
The release notes of Fennec Alpha 4 for Windows Mobile include: - Improved interactions with the software keyboard - Fixed painting artifacts from panning - Faster .exe installer option - More responsive "fuzzy" zoom - Option to become default browser - Opening downloads from download manager fixed - Password echoing - Improved panning/scrolling performance - Improved start-up time - Numerous bug fixes - Improved painting performance - Improved UI polish - Improved kinetic panning with directional locking - Ability to scroll frames - Improved zooming support
At the same time, the company notes that they will continue to work on the stability of the browser for Windows Mobile-based handsets. There are a great deal of enhancements, bug fixes and performance improvements included in this release, as one can see in the list above, and many more will be included in future releases of the software solution. The application has been designed to work with all Windows Mobile Professional 6.0 or higher handsets, and can work great on phones that include 256Mb of RAM or greater, ARMv6 800MHz, and 32Mb of free storage. According to the company, the application has been tested on HTC Touch Pro, Samsung Omnia II, and the Acer neoTouch devices, but they are focused on making it available on as many handsets as possible.