Mozilla has been working on Fennec, otherwise known as Firefox Mobile, for a while now. Fennec 1.0 and 1.1 were only available for Maemo, Nokia’s Linux-based open-source operating system. They have been slaving away at bringing 2.0 to Android and Maemo’s successor, Meego.
It looks like things are looking well, as Mozilla seeks to open up an alpha for Fennec 2.0 in a few weeks.
One of the biggest features of Fennec 2.0 is called Electrolysis. This allows the Fennec UI to remain responsive even while pages are loading.
Some of the other features are:
– Firefox Sync is now built in – sync tabs, bookmarks, and history from your computer to your phone, no add-on required!
– The new Find In Page command is available through the site menu (or by pressing Control+F on a hardware keyboard).
– You can now share links through Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, or email. (The final version of this feature will also let you send links using native Android or Maemo apps.)
– Fennec 2 can use your phone’s address book to make it easy to enter phone numbers and email adresses into web forms. (This works on Maemo now; support for Android will be added later.)
– We’re adding multi-touch gestures. Pinch zoom has landed for alpha; later releases will also include multi-touch swipe gestures to go to the top or bottom of the current page, or navigate between pages.
Looking into the future, it looks like there will be a beta by the end of 2010.
If you want to try out a nightly build, click here. It is confirmed to work on Nexus One and Droid. Note that this can break your system, and is not meant for day-to-day use.
If you have a device running Maemo, you can download Fennec 1.1 here.