Mozilla’s Fennec browser being leaked and compiled in the past, today I am reporting on the newly released “pre-alpha” version of the browser which already attracted people. The release comes via the blog of Vladimir Vukicevic, an “Infrastructuralist” at Mozilla whose blog has a fair amount of posts about Firefox’ little cousin.
Support includes installing extensions, which I find very cool. Warnings abound: it’s extremely buggy at the moment, but right now I’d take something from the developer over some fan-compiled projects.
This build should be considered “pre-alpha”, so there are some warnings and caveats:
- We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
- It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
- Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
- You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
- You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
- This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device
