Smartphone Thoughts: Fennec, Mozilla's Mobile Browser, Enters Beta

"It's looking more and more like Mozilla is ready to really do this: Late last night, the organization posted the first public beta of the browser that could end up being "Firefox Mobile." It still goes by the code name Fennec, and the first beta is testing whether touchscreen mobile users will be willing to have literally all their browser functions be placed off-screen, if it makes room for more elements of the Web page."

What I find interesting - and impressive - is that Fennec is going to have TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine that will come with Firefox 3.5. Usually mobile components tend to be stripped down, pale shadows of their desktop counters - it's nice to see the Mozilla developers putting performance at the forefront. Right now the beta is only for desktop Windows, which surprises me a little bit - you'd think that the beta stage was when they'd be ready to do the on device testing after the desktop testing in the Alpha stage. Still, I'm thrilled to see Fennec starting to gain some momentum - with the continued fumbling by Microsoft in getting a great mobile browser into the hands of its customers, it's nice to see another option coming for us to use.