The last time I wrote about Mozilla's Fennec (four weeks ago), it was a very early build and we saw a video of it being demonstrated on a Droid. In those four weeks, it seems as if the have reached a stage in which they feel it is ready for public feedback, and here is where you can DL it. Keep in mind that this early release of it is not going to run very smoothly.
The browser still only works on devices sporting Android 2.0 or later and OpenGL ES 2.0 support, so the majority of us are out of luck. AndroidGuys added that Fennec "is a 10MB download that expands to over 31MB upon installation." Vladimir wrote about some important caveats for this pre-alpha release:
- 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.
- Edit: This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.
AndroidCentral notes that they heard about the upcoming ability to "sync your history, bookmarks and even open tabs between your desktop and mobile browser." Does Mozilla's offering have you thinking about switching your browser? Let us know!
Other Sources: Phandroid, AndroidCentral, AndroidGuys
Image from Vladimir Vukićević
Peter Long
sticking to opera for now.....