Fennec User Experience Alpha – Mobile Firefox

I saw yesterday that Fennec, the Mobile Firefox Browser, had reached alpha, that is Milestone 9 and User Experience Alpha for Nokia N800/N810 (Maemo), no support for Windows Mobile yet, but support for your Desktop, for testing purposes.

As with the previous milestones, M9 is targeted at the Nokia N800/N810 (Maemo) Internet tablet. Yes, we have made great progress on Windows Mobile, but no milestone releases yet. However, in addition to the native Maemo release, we are also releasing desktop versions of Fennec. That’s right, you can install Fennec on your Windows, OS X or Linux desktop too! We want you to be able to experiment, provide feedback, write add-ons and generally get involved with the Mozilla Mobile project, even if you don’t have a device.

Windows Mobile Users must scream for a good browser as the browser today is based on IE4, and to cite ars technica: “IE Mobile isn’t just a bad browser. It’s also a bad mobile application.”. And the next step in evolving this browser is to upgrade it to the IE6 codebase (no this article is not written 2001, it is 2008). Maybe I am being to conspiratorial, but I believe Microsoft has realised that they lost the browser war on the mobiles, how could they otherwise believe that IE6 is good enough when all the other major hardware and software providers can do zillions times better than that when adding browsing software such as Opera, WebKit and Mozilla to their handhelds. If Microsoft want to be a part of the changes that happens now to the mobile web, they better start changing strategy and focus on their browser in Windows Mobile.

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