Mozilla's answer to Opera Mini (and a host of other mobile browsers) has reached beta status and is already available for download as Fennec 1.0 Beta 1.
The browser is available for use only on Nokia N810 for now and according to a preview from Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter, should look pretty similar to Firefox 3 browser.
Those interested can try Fennec on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer.
Stuart writes on his blog that Mozilla did some "heavy optimisations to our frontend code and made a number of optimisations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth".
Two videos of the promising browser have been released with the support for add-ons touted as the most exciting feature that emerged from the short preview.
TraceMonkey has already been enabled which means that Javascript execution on the platform will see a huge speed improvement. The developers will now need to code different versions for the many mobile platforms on the market.
Fennec Beta 1 walkthrough (opens in new tab) from Madhava Enros (opens in new tab) on Vimeo (opens in new tab)
Fennec Gestures and Chromeless browsing (opens in new tab) from Felipe (opens in new tab) on Vimeo (opens in new tab).
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Our Comments
Like Pavlov, the preview of Fennec made us salivate. Unfortunately, it is only available on Nokia's Tablet N810 and there are no release dates yet. Mozilla is still doing some heavy optimisation in the front and behind the scenes and the two add-ons that have appeared, Weave and the Gesture addon only scratch the surface of what's possible.
Related Links
Mobile Firefox hits first beta (opens in new tab)
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Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 (opens in new tab)
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Mobile Firefox Hits Beta 1, Available for Nokia N810 (opens in new tab)
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Mozilla Fennec for Windows 1.0 Beta 1 (opens in new tab)
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Mozilla's mobile browser experiment finally enters beta (opens in new tab)
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Mozilla Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 for Maemo released (opens in new tab)
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