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Back when MTV still played videos, the Internet was full of web pages designed to work in desktop browsers. Life was good - so were the videos. Fast forward to today. The Web is still full of “best viewed in a desktop browser” web pages, however, you can also find lots of “made for mobile” web pages too.

Mobile Firefox for Maemo Beta 5 will have lots of improvements. One of those will be support for multiple locales. The install package will include several locales. The application will detect the locale of the device and try to find the corresponding Mozilla locale. If the system works as designed, the Firefox UI will automagically appear in the device’s locale.

Building an add-on for Fennec (mobile Firefox) can be a bit tedious. We release desktop versions of Fennec that allow developers to test and play with their add-ons without the need for a mobile device. However, there are a few things that the desktop versions of Fennec do not expose: Performance characteristics of running on a mobile device; and the affect of small screens and high DPI.

The Mozilla Mobile Team is happy to announce the release of Fennec 1.0 beta 4 for Maemo. As promised, we have been working hard on user experience and UI polish. Here’s a few changes you’ll find in this release:

We’re in the last weeks of development before releasing Fennec 1.0 to the world. There has been a lot of great testing and feedback. I think we have a well defined set of things to work on for 1.0 and a good idea of what we want to look at for 1.0+.

If you’ve developed applications or extensions using the Mozilla platform, you know that there are tons of services and APIs available. We use those same capabilities when building Fennec. However, there are times when the default platform behavior is not desirable on mobile devices. When that happens, we could hack up our own system, or we could re-implement the platform APIs to suit our needs. We try to do the latter.

Designing a portable application to run on many different mobile devices is a challenge. Screen sizes and pixel densities are different making it difficult to create the One Great Layout. In addition, mobile devices can change screen orientation, from portrait to landscape and back again.