[rudyru01]

Posted: 10 Feb 2009 05:56 PM PST

Ask and ye shall receive. No sooner do we get another very cool look at what Fennec – Mozilla's Firefox Mobile browser – can do, the team releases the first "Milestone Release" for the HTC Touch Pro.
A word of warning: This is a "Milestone Release" and is not the finished product. As Mozilla's Brad Lassey explains:

Our focus to this point has been to have a working, usable browser. To get there in a hurry we have punted in a few places, and I’d like to point a couple of them out. First is the update mechanism (both for the browser itself and for extensions). After installing this release, you will not be offered updates automatically, so please stay tuned for follow up releases. Also, we have disabled plug-in support. This is one of our high priority items going forward. Finally, as I mentioned before, there is no soft keyboard support. On an HTC Touch Pro, you’ll have to slide out the keyboard to enter a url.

Lassey also takes on the recent "leaked" versions of Fennec that were floating around. (See our own "There's a Mad Fennec on the Loose")

Over the last week and half there have been several blog posts and “news” articles floating around the internet about leaked Windows Mobile Fennec builds. This has been fairly entertaining to those of us working on the project for a couple reasons. First, the builds that these posts have pointed to are the builds that I pointed to on twitter. They were intended to be used by the developers working on the project (or anyone else willing to deal with really buggy software) to find bugs before we pushed anything out to the general public.

While today's Milestone Release isn't the finished product, it's the first time most of us are going to get a good hands-on with the mobile browser best positioned to take on mobile Safari. So, back up your phone (we'll say it again — back up your phone) go download the CAB file here (again, HTC Touch Pro only, for now), and get to playin'. Let us know in the comments how it's holding up for you.
Update: Looks like the browser loads just fine, but the actual, uh, browsing may not be going so fine. Don't say we didn't warn you.



Firefox Mobile can support gesture browsing; beta version coming later this month?
Posted: 10 Feb 2009 12:54 PM PST

We're still waiting for an official beta of Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser, and it now looks like it's targeted for later this month. [via] (Update: The Milestone Release is out now.) But in the meantime, here's some more to whet your appetite. One of the cooler features of Fennec is its ability to support add-ons, just like it's big brother desktop browser. Above we have a video from felipc, who's doing some very cool work with gesture inputs for the browser.
Obviously, this is a demonstration performed on a Mac, but you can imagine how powerful this could be on a mobile phone. We see demonstrated:

• Open a new tab: draw a circle
• Close a tab: draw an X
• Go to home page: draw a house
• Bookmark a page: draw a star
• Open a mini menu: draw a counter-clockwise circle

Get this on a properly equipped phone – it remains to be seen what kind of graphics/processing power it's going to need, though the Touch Pro was identified as a probable beta test platform – and it likely could become our browser of choice