Mozilla Debuts Experimental Firefox for Tablets

Mozilla is moving fast these days. Less than a couple of weeks after revealing its design concept for a tablet version of the Firefox browser for Android, the first builds with the actual tablet UI are available.

Granted, these are very early builds and there are a lot of rough edges. Plenty of bugs are to be expected as well and no one believes that you're going to use this version of Firefox as your day-to-day tablet browser.

However, the team has been making progress and it was time for some real-world feedback.

If you're curious to see what Firefox for tablets will look like, you now have a chance to, as long as you're willing to put up with the inherent instability of the experimental build.

An early version of the Firefox (Fennec) tablet UI is available in the Nightly channel, with Firefox 9, and in the Aurora channel (Firefox 8).

"Firefox Mobile front-enders, have been working hard for the last few weeks to get the new Firefox UI for tablets in place for general testing. It has now reached a functional state that is good enough for getting some early feedback,"  Mozilla's Lucas Rocha announced.

The only reason why the team released this early version is to get feedback, so if you see something broken, tell Mozilla about it. Of course, Mozilla would much better appreciate you fixing the broken things yourself, if you're able.

"If you want to contribute code, have a look at our current list of tablet-related bugs—see the dependent bugs—and let us know what bugs you want to work on. Setting up a Fennec development environment is fairly simple," Rocha wrote.

While the tablet UI is rough, in its current form, the team is moving quickly. If everything goes smoothly, it may land in a stable version of the mobile browser before the end of the year, along with Firefox 8.