14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has been already known to work on the development of a mobile browser for handsets running under Google's Android operating system, and now the first signs of progress are being shown. After learning not too long ago that Firefox for Android should be many months away, and that February is only expected to bring forth a version that can render web pages, now we have the possibility to take a look at this development milestone.
Firefox for Android has already reached that state in which it can render a web page, it seems, that one happy developer from the team has posted a screenshot showing the progress. However, this doesn't mean that the browser is set to arrive into the wild earlier than previously stated, but only to show that progress is being made, and that Android mobile phone users out there should relax and wait for it.
“You'll note that this is the full Firefox interface, and not the Fennec/Firefox Mobile UI; we're testing with the full interface because it's significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well. Given the interest in Android on netbook and tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these. Android has been pretty great to work with so far; it's a bit unusual platform for us due to its Java core, but with the NDK we're able to bridge things together without many problems,” Vladimir Vukicevic notes on his blog.
The mobile flavor of Firefox is built on the same browser engine as the desktop Firefox 3.6, which means that users should receive the same experience as when at their computers. The owners of a Nokia N900 device can already enjoy the first final version of Firefox for the Maemo 5 platform running on their handsets, while Windows Mobile users can taste an Alpha 3 flavor that was released last year. With Android included in the company's mobile plans, the focus will remain on these three versions of the browser, it seems, at least for the time being.