Fennec 2.0: What’s Coming

We haven’t even released the final Firefox for Maemo 1.1 yet, but we have been very busy working on features and changes for the next major release. Check out the Fennec 2.0 project planning page.

The biggest changes are related to out-of-process web content (Project Electrolysis) and accelerated rendering (Project Layers). Significant amounts of platform work have been done on both projects. Fennec 2.0 will integrate both Electrolysis and Layers.

Electrolysis will be the first of the two making an appearance in Fennec. Benjamin Smedberg’s kickoff post for Electrolysis summarizes the project goals:

  • Increased stability: if a plugin or webpage tries to use all the processor, memory, or even crashes, a process can isolate that bad behavior from the rest of the browser.
  • Performance: By splitting work up among multiple processes, the browser can make use of multiple processor cores available on modern desktop computers and the next generation of mobile processors. The user interface can also be more responsive because it doesn’t need to block on long-running web page activities.
  • Security: If the operating system can run a process with lower privileges, the browser can isolate web pages from the rest of the computer, making it harder for attackers to infect a computer.

In fact, Electrolysis has already been used in Firefox 3.6.4 to protect against plugin crashes. Fennec will extend this beyond plugins to the entire web content. All web content will execute in a separate process from the main application. This does create some interesting code changes for both the application and add-ons.

We started a transition document and I’ll cover more details on those changes soon. Look for multi-process web content to appear in Fennec 2.0 Alpha 1 – coming soon.

Work to integrate Layers into Fennec will start shortly after the release of Alpha 1. In addition to the potential of hardware accelerated rendering on mobile devices, Layers also allows Fennec to remove the custom built canvas-tile-cache rendering solution used to achieve decent panning performance and responsiveness. Layers supports a “retained mode” rendering system, which means the application can drop the canvas-tile-cache system and use traditional XUL elements for the browsing surface.

There is a lot of work to do, but progress is happening at a surprisingly fast pace. Fennec 1.1 adds a lot of solid UX features and although we’ll continue to improve the UX for Fennec 2.0, the primary reasons for many of the platform changes are: Speed, Responsiveness and Stability!

Firefox for Maemo 1.1 RC 1

Firefox for Maemo 1.1 RC 1 is ready to install. For this release, the focus was some UI features we didn’t have time to put in the initial release. We also used your feedback from previous releases and nightly builds to help improve the browsing experience.

Some of the bigger features include:

As always, we’ve provided unbranded Fennec desktop builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can use these if you don’t have a Maemo device or to aid in add-on development. This is the final call for Add-on developers to update their add-ons from Firefox 1.0.x for Maemo.

Note to Ovi Store Customers: If you installed Firefox 1.0.x from the Ovi Store, you will not be able to upgrade to Firefox 1.1 RC 1 (either from the N900 Application Manager or by downloading the software from Mozilla). We are working to solve this for future releases so that anyone can participate in our Beta programs. Don’t worry, though, if you got Firefox 1.0.x from either the Ovi store or directly from Mozilla, you will be updated to Firefox 1.1 (final) when it is released.