Coming soon: Firefox for Windows Mobile

Beleaguered Windows Mobile users will soon have one less thing to complain about thanks to the upcoming release of Firefox Mobile, codenamed Fennec. the:unwired has posted screenshots of the latest build running on a Windows Mobile Professional smartphone, and while these differ slightly from the working UI mockups shown on the Mozilla Mobile Wiki, they’re a tantalising promise of what’s to come.

Christian Sejersen, director of mobile engineering at Mozilla, first announced the company would develop mobile versions of Firefox for Windows Mobile and Linux on his blog a year ago. Among his team’s goals was to develop a ‘full-featured mobile browser including support for XUL-based add-ons, delivering on Firefox’s key principles of ease-of-use, security and accessibility’.

Fennec uses the same Gecko rendering engine used by Firefox 3 on the desktop, and offers full support for JavaScript, AJAX, offline storage, add-ons, and other Web 2.0 technologies. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for public download yet, but according to the:unwired, a first Alpha is due for release before the end of the year.

A video posted by Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, shows how some of the features in the screenshots will work. Like Safari on the iPhone, it uses gestures for panning around the page. A control strip on the right side of the page – revealed by swiping the page all the way to the left – lets you bookmark a page, navigate backwards and forwards, add a new tab and access the browser’s settings.



Another strip on the left side – this time revealed by swiping the page all the way to the right – reveals thumbnails for tabs that are currently open. Below the thumbnails are two controls; we’re not sure what the one on the right does, but the first button creates a new tab when you tap it.



We’re a little baffled by the third screenshot, which shows text buttons at the top of the page that mimic the controls available on the hidden control strip and titlebar. But we’re hoping that the missing titlebar in this screenshot reflects the working UI mockups, which demonstrates the titlebar disappearing once the page has finished loading to maximise screen real estate.



The final screenshot shows an Acid3 test score of 88/100. Acid3 tests a browser’s compliance with web standards, and in particular tests its ability to run dynamic Web 2.0 applications. Firefox Mobile’s score is remarkable when you compare it to the results from other desktop browsers; Softpedia did a comparison of IE8 Beta 2, Google Chrome and Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 RC, and the Acid3 results were 21, 78 and 85 respectively (a higher score is better).



Of course, Acid3 doesn’t test a browser’s resource consumption, and with the desktop version of Firefox’s notoriety for hogging resources and memory leakage, the question remains as to how well Firefox Mobile will run on current Windows Mobile smartphones, which aren’t renowned for snappy performance as it is. Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, acknowledges the challenges of creating a no-compromise web experience on mobile devices on his blog, and mentions that significant changes to the Gecko 1.9 architecture – such as reducing the use of XPCOM and unifying memory management – will improve performance and memory use.