Mozilla Firefox Launches On Android Phones

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Fennec (aka Firefox Mobile) was one of the most highly-talked about and anticipated applications for Android phones. Fennec is still in its pre-alpha stage and by no means perfect. However, it’s been receiving some positive reviews already.

Rumors started circulating in early February this year that Fennec would be launched for Androids at the end of 2010. So it was a nice surprise to see the app ready just before May. We would really need to congratulate and thank Vladimir Vukicevic, Michael Wu, Brad Lassey and Alex Pakhotin on their long nights of hard work over the past few months.
Fennec is still work in process and has a few kinks and bugs to iron out. Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic listed some of the problems and issues on his blog today.

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. This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.

An interesting feature is the Weave experimental version within Fennec. Installing this add-on will allow you to synchronize your activities on Fennec with your Firefox desktop browser.

Although right now Fennec has been rather unstable for some people, overall it has gained positive reviews. Users see some great potential with this web browser.

Ready to test drive Fennec yourself? Download the application on your Android phone by simply going to this link: http://bit.ly/fennec-android from your mobile web browser.