Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 9, which is also our first alpha! We’re calling this release the User Experience alpha. The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface. We really want to get Fennec in front of as many people as possible and get feedback.
As with the previous milestones, M9 is targeted at the Nokia N800/N810 (Maemo) Internet tablet. Yes, we have made great progress on Windows Mobile, but no milestone releases yet. However, in addition to the native Maemo release, we are also releasing desktop versions of Fennec. That’s right, you can install Fennec on your Windows, OS X or Linux desktop too! We want you to be able to experiment, provide feedback, write add-ons and generally get involved with the Mozilla Mobile project, even if you don’t have a device.
The release notes have information on a quick start, how to install, what’s new, known issues and how to provide feedback. So if you’re interested in getting involved with Mozilla Mobile, install Fennec and tell us what you think.
Update: Madhava Enros, UX lead for Fennec, posted a video walk through of the application. Check it out.
Update: We noticed that the desktop builds had the mouse cursor turned off. This is good for touchscreen devices, but bad for desktop applications. We flipped a preference and updated the desktop builds. If you downloaded a desktop build and have the cursor problem, just download the build again, it’s been fixed.
Visible mouse cursor is strongly missing on desktop Windows port…
Is there a way to turn the mouse pointer on for the desktop version?
Yep, that slipped by us in the desktop versions. New desktop builds are coming up.
or use about:config and set browser.ui.cursor = true
What’s the relationship between current XULRunner and Fennec?
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We are building applications based on XULRunner, Is there any chance to migrating our apps to mobile devices?
Pretty cool, but I don’t see a blinking text cursor in input fields.
Love the descriptions on the content and privacy preferences. Delicious delicacies!
IIRC Fennec is a XULRunner application, so running your XULRunner applications on mobile devices should be easy provided you don’t use any OS-specific features and the UI is small enough.
Am I wrong or options (like Enable Javascript, Enable plugins, etc.) are not localizable? I can’t find the related strings
Is there build instructions for building this against xulrunner. I would like to get a desktop build of it into Fedora.
@Question – Like Bielawski said, Fennec is built using XULRunner and XULRunner is installed with Fennec. Yes, you can use that XULRunner to build and run your own XUL-based applications on any mobile platform we support.
@Andy King – Know issue. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458373
@Peter Robinson – See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Build/Fennec
@flod – See http://hg.mozilla.org/mobile-browser/file/b394a7122c10/locales/en-US/chrome/preferences.dtd
I posted 14 issues here
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/browse_thread/thread/da0effc3d93ec1dd#
Sorry, I don’t have time to search for and or file 14 bugs and I wanted to get these out in the open asap.
I’ve tried the Linux version of Fennec, and most admit that it may be good for handhelds, but not usable for desktops –
A. Mouse wheel is acting as Zoom-In/Zoom-Out and there is no visible scrollbars (a most for non touch displays).
B. The preferences screen is broken. I can see the screen but not change things.
C. I’ve thought that Fennec will use Firefox profile. It is not the case, but please note that the Profile Manager controls are not GTK themed.
D. Devices with points would like the panels to appear when the mouse cursor touch the left/right edges of the screen.
E. How do I do actions such as Copy-Paste? It seems that it is impossible but even my Pocket Internet Explorer can do it easily.
More to come.
I just tried Fennec and I must say that I am amazed by this very creative way of making a browser usable without wasting screen real-estate.
There are of course small bugs, but this being an alpha I am not surprised, and I don’t think it matters at all to see that is an excellent way forward for the ‘mobile web’
maybe it would be advisable to make an option to have either the tabs or the controls visible at all times for users with handheld devices with larger screen real-estate.
It would also be a good idea to make the address bar hidable in the same way that the tabs and control panes are, for users with smaller screens.
All in all I think this is a very intuitive and impressive way of webbrowsing on touch-based devices with limited screen real-estate.
good show!
Awww, I don’t suppose you still have the “no cursor” binary around anywhere. I’m running Linux on a tablet and think that’d be a good way to develop. I guess I could just grab the source and figure out how to build it.
@Tomer Cohen – Thanks for the feedback. Honestly, Fennec is not designed for desktops. It is focused on touchscreen (no-mouse) devices. CTRL+C and CTRL+V should work for copy and paste, respectively. Thanks again for the feedback.
@raindog469 – go to “about:config” and set the “browser.ui.cursor” preference to “false”
Ops, you’re right! I don’t understand how I could miss that file this morning š
I just downloaded and tried out the Windows build. Very impressive for a first alpha!
First thing I did was go to a test page with an AJAX chat application. It handles the ajax chat very nicely. The page is designed for compatibility with very little code specific to any particular browser and its nice to see this browser fitting right in and working.
Cool, this looks pretty neat. I’ll be testing this on a tablet PC so I can sort of test how the functionality will work. I guess on-screen keyboard will be provided by the mobile OS, though? Because otherwise it seems like this would be unusable on a touch-screen only device.
Something that would be nice is an “editing window” for textboxes.
As a case in point, on Opera on the Nintendo DS, when you select a text box, it will open a new window allowing you to perform all editing functions (like selecting and deleting text, and having a cursor…), and has an onscreen keyboard/handwriting recognition pane. It also has a button to switch back to the web browser when you’re done, one to cancel the edits, and one to submit the form using the data entered.
At the moment there is no cursor in any text box, and as such, editing text becomes a bit of a blind task.
Also, please continue desktop builds.
It would be nice to be able to do mobile web development without needing access to lots of different mobile devices — maybe include some emulation modes for some of the more popular devices to make it easier to work through.
raindog: Go to about:config and set browser.ui.cursor to false.
any chance of a symbian (n95) port?
Dunno if you guys thought about this, but I was playing with Fennec on Mac OSX and found it’s usability way nicer than FF, or other traditional browsers. I use a Wacom tablet which mimicked the touch aspect of the browser nicely. In fact, it was way more intuitive than I had hoped. It would be great to get this kind of functionality in Firefox. It always irks me that I can’t just hold the space bar down and move through a web page (just like photohop works when moving around the artboard). Being an illustrator it’s also annoying to switch pen to mouse all the time when I want to browse the net during a drawing.
Just thought I’d drop my thoughts on it. Very cool app, much success.
Looks pretty slick on OS X….now, if we could just get this ported for the iPhone š
I have a web Page i use for links on my own web server and the Mac Port didn’t want to scroll to the bottom of that page. Its a split page with two frames. One is longer then the other and it stopped when it got to the end of the shorter one.
Love the interface and where the tabs are etc. Nice one.
If Fennec didn’t require a touchscreen, it might be a better fit for the OLPC XO-1 than FFv3, which runs just tolerably but still feels too heavy.
I wondering if I install this on a Linux system, will it step on the existing FF install?
@schwaang – Fennec will not step on an existing Firefox profile. They are separate applications.
I *really* hope that you don’t leave the back/forward buttons hidden on the side in later releases. Those are the buttons that I use most frequently, having to waste an extra motion just to get to them is pretty annoying. If sacrifices need to be made perhaps the refresh/stop button and the bookmark button could be put there instead?
How final is the interface, is this already decided upon, or is it up for discussion?
Any plans for a PalmOS release? I know it’s dated, but there are still a lot of faithful garnet-heads on the interwebs…
@doog – moving the back/forward buttons into visible area won’t happen without really good reason. We are probably going to use a device hard button for “back”, so it will be easy to access.
Any possibility of a BlackBerry release?
Intel-only binary for the Mac. Will it build and run on PPC?
I don’t agree with you that Fennec should be only focused for mobile devices. See the Ultra Mobile computers out there – they may have larger screen than the average handheld, but it is still too small to be usable with regular browsers.
OLPC, for example, have some kind of mix between Minimo and the regular Firefox – if Fennec will be stable enough – OLPC owners will use it.
Won’t start on my laptop (Dell Inspiron E1705, running WinXP SP2). All I get is the WinXP “Critical stop” sound; no windows (not even an error message dialog). Build ID of Fennec is 20081015230623. Ideas on how to get it running?
Some feedback:
http://www.dinkercharak.in/blog/2008/10/technology/opensource/using-mozillas-fennec/
The Windows build looks great! The only thing is scrolling tends to bring up the side panels and top panel when you really don’t want it to. Even moving the mouse slightly left/right moved the panels into view. It gets annoying having them end up coming out unexpectedly. I think the threshold for left/right scrolling (or just the threshold for bringing out the panels) should be changed so that you have to scroll a bit more to get them to open. This will reduce accidental opening of the panels. Second, the panels are way huge…why? The address bar is twice the height of regular desktop Firefox. Mobile is about reducing size to fit screens better, not cluttering them even more with giant sized icons.
Also, I couldn’t get frames to work. A site we often visit in my political science class, electoral-vote.com, has a US map where holding the cursor over a state brings up current poll information. These popups didn’t work while holding the stylus on a state (well, holding the mouse button on a state in this case). It doesn’t work in Opera Mobile 9.5b either, but it works in Minimo 0.2 and Opera 8.65.
I’m quite impressed with the JavaScript, a 90/100 on Acid3? That’s amazing! This browser has tons of potential, the idea of the user interface is good, but it could still use some tweaks. I think putting a Back button on the top bar would be a reasonable idea, so you don’t have to keep pulling out the side bar. Sleek looks are nice, but more and more they are causing interfaces to become oversimplified and the lack of buttons means more scrolling or digging through menus and side bars to find what you want.
Any particular reason why there’s releases for everything but Windows Mobile so far? I’d really like to test this on my PDA and I’ve seen the screenshots, it clearly runs on WM. I haven’t been able to compile because the guide on the Mozilla wiki never explains where you get the arm-wince-gcc.exe and other build tools required to build the mobile version (I only have the source files for them, which also don’t compile using make, wtf?).
Fennec packages optimized for various ARM architectures: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?pkgname=fennec
Is Symbian Series 60 v2/v3 port planned ?