Download and Test Fennec 1.0 Beta 1
The smartphone version of the Mozilla developed Firefox browser, Fennec, has recently reached another milestone in its development process, mainly the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 1. This marks the 12th development milestone in for the smaller fox in the Mozilla family, not to mention that it is the first Beta release.
It seems that the development team at the Mozilla Foundation are certainly keeping themselves busy; people keeping track of these things are undoubtedly aware of the fact that only a few days ago Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 was made available for download. This is certainly good news for Mozilla fans in the sense that they can enjoy enhanced performance on their desktop computer and on their smartphone.
“Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta,” explains Software Engineer with Mozilla, Stuart Parmenter.
As you can see from the explanation above, Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 comes with many much welcomed improvements on the performance front. But it does not stop here; there are also some new features you need to be made aware of:
- Plugins work with Fennec 1.0 Beta 1, meaning that video playback is now supported by the browser.
- Bookmark management has been improved.
- Support for bookmark folders.
- Scroll through the bookmarks and preferences list.
A detailed list of changes and a download location (for Nokia N810 Internet Tablets, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) is available here.
It seems that the development team at the Mozilla Foundation are certainly keeping themselves busy; people keeping track of these things are undoubtedly aware of the fact that only a few days ago Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 was made available for download. This is certainly good news for Mozilla fans in the sense that they can enjoy enhanced performance on their desktop computer and on their smartphone.
“Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta,” explains Software Engineer with Mozilla, Stuart Parmenter.
As you can see from the explanation above, Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 comes with many much welcomed improvements on the performance front. But it does not stop here; there are also some new features you need to be made aware of:
- Plugins work with Fennec 1.0 Beta 1, meaning that video playback is now supported by the browser.
- Bookmark management has been improved.
- Support for bookmark folders.
- Scroll through the bookmarks and preferences list.
A detailed list of changes and a download location (for Nokia N810 Internet Tablets, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) is available here.
