Firefox on Your Cell Phone

Can Fennec, Mozilla's new mobile browser, compete?

With the iPhone, Apple showed how to surf the Web on the small screen. Now, it seems, a modern version of the browser wars of the 1990s could be shaping up, with the battleground being the mobile phone. And there's a new list of contenders: Safari on the iPhone, Internet Explorer Mobile for Windows Mobile, RIM's BlackBerry Web browser, and a version of Chrome for Google's Android phones. Within the next few months, there will be a new entry: a scaled-down, sped-up version of Firefox, called Fennec.

Tiny fox: Mozilla’s new mobile browser, called Fennec, was recently released to developers. The software currently runs on Nokia’s N810 Internet tablet, but Mozilla says that it should be available on cell phones next year. Credit: Technology Review

Multimedia   Click here to see the new Fennec browser in action.

Last week, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, released an "alpha" version of Fennec, just as the desktop version of its browser reached 20 percent of the market for the first time. This early release lets programmers play with the interface, catch bugs, and write add-on features, says Jay Sullivan, vice president of mobile at Mozilla. Fennec (named for a type of small fox) is hardly consumer ready: it currently operates only on the somewhat bulky Nokia N810 Internet tablet, and there are plenty of bugs and interface challenges to iron out, says Sullivan. But by the first part of 2009, Fennec could be ready to run on consumer phones.

So far, says Sullivan, the feedback from the developers toying with Fennec has been positive. Early tests of the browser show its JavaScript performance, a measure of speed, will be competitive with the Android and mobile Safari JavaScript performance, Sullivan says.

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But Mozilla still faces the challenge of distributing Fennec. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all have direct channels for distribution--operating systems for Internet-enabled phones. But Mozilla's path will require securing deals with other manufacturers and operating-system makers to ensure compatibility. While it's easy to upload software on a desktop computer, handset makers and cellular providers tightly control the software that can run on their handsets. For instance, Apple has kept other third-party Web browsers off the iPhone App Store.

Despite these challenges, Sullivan hopes that the novel look and feel of Fennec will boost its popularity. In conjunction with user-interface designers at Mozilla Labs, the Fennec team built a mobile browser so that its controls can be easily accessed but disappear when users don't need them. One of the main goals, Sullivan says, was to "give over the entire screen of the device to the Web content, removing all user-interface controls entirely." Using a touch-screen interface, a user drags her finger to the right to reveal open tabs, and to the left to reveal controls such as the back button and the address bar.