This blog post talks about the latest alpha milestone release of Fennec, the Firefox app for Windows Mobile. You can grab the CAB file directly from your handheld here. I love Firefox on any and every platform so this got me excited. I looked around the web for others who have tried it out and found this article from PCMag talking about how they could not get Fennec pre-alpha to load a single webpage! Can you believe that?
Well I continued on doing my due diligence and discovered the pre-alpha was created for a single device, the HTC Touch Pro. I am rocking an HTC Touch Pro 2 so I gave it a go. And I had some rather surprising results. I documented my trip through FireFox for Windows Mobile here.
The first thing I did was to use the above link to grab the CAB file directly on my device from Mozilla’s FTP. Next up I navigated to the file using Total Commander. You can just as easily use the built-in File Explorer or any other Explorer for that matter. Simply run the CAB file and install it to YOUR DEVICE!
Do Not Install To The Memory Card!
Marvel in amazement as Fennec 1.0a3 installs on your device. It took me 1.6 minutes which is pretty long for a Windows Mobile install.
After the installation is complete you will have a Fennec icon on your start menu. Simply click it and let’s see how she works. After launching the application it took almost another full minute to load up Fennec. I saw a progress bar as it loaded. Something you do not see much of on Windows Mobile.
And then boom just like that I was at a about:firstrun screen. That went away quickly and brought me to a Fennec page. But you can see on the search screen links to Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Wikipedia ““ sorry Bing lovers.
The Fennec screen shows that you can hold the device in any orientation you like and the application will recognize it using your devices built-in gravity sensor. Scroll to the right and you will see a button to add the page to your favorites and a gear button to open up Fennec’s settings. I clicked on the star button and it adds a favorite without any other intervention. Click on the gear and we will go to the applications preferences.
The first page of the preferences page shows you a button to see information about Fennec, the option to show or hide images (great for mobile slow browsing) Enable Javascript which is mind blowing on a mobile device and Enable Plugins which also brings a woo-hoo out of me.
Plugins make the desktop iteration of Firefox so powerful and now here they are on the handheld. Nice! Cookies, passwords and clearing the recent cache all can be set up and configured from this menu.
The puzzle piece brings you to the add-ons menu. I tried searching for add-ons but I could not find any!
Well in all fairness it said it couldn’t retrieve any add-ons. Either the server is not running or it is and there are no plug-ins to download and test. But this shows huge promise.
The arrow pointing down is your download manager ““ another very nice feature to extend to your mobile device. The last button did not do anything for me. If you know what it is (I thought volume control) let me know.
And last but certainly NOT least, here is me browsing the web with Fennec which works flawlessly for me and it pretty quick to boot. I was running Javascript on AskTheAdmin and it came through perfectly. I also tested cookies and the image blocking via preferences. All working very nicely. I don’t know if I will be switching from Skyfire any time soon but I will be testing it and watching it mature and progress.
Have you got any other information about Fennec? If so, please leave it in the comments!
Tagged: browsers • firefox • mobile browsing • mobile phones • smartphones • Windows mobile
