Mozilla today put out a very early look at Firefox for Android. Code named “Fennec”, today’s pre-alpha release was put together by a group of Mozilla developers mainly for testing and feedback purposes.
Thus far it has only been tested on the Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One because of its requirements and early stage in development. Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukićević has compiled a list of caveats that testers should keep in mind when previewing the browser:
- 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.
Users wishing to test it out can either download it directly from their browser at bit.ly/fennec-android or by using the QR code above. Be sure to allow non-Market app installations in Settings -> Applications -> Unknown Sources.
Testers can leave feedback at the official Fennec Pre-Alpha Google Groups landing page.
Image credit Vladimir Vukićević