Mozilla Officially Unveils A Pre-Alpha Test Version Of Firefox For Android

Late last month, a number of sites noted that a very early build of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, was available to download for Android phones. However, that build wasn’t official as it was put together by an individual and optimized for the Droid device. Today, Mozilla has itself put out a pre-Alpha build of Fennec that should work at the very least on Droid and the Nexus One.

Mozilla is quick to note that this is a pre-Alpha build of the browser, and is only for testing purposes. But that isn’t stopping Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević from announcing it on his blog. “There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha).  But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop,” he notes.

To get this build, you can visit this link on your Android device. Or you can point your phone’s browser to: bit.ly/fennec-android. And yes, there’s a QR code on Vukićević’s blog post if you want to scan it, and download it that way. Whichever way you do it, you’ll need to make sure your settings allow you to install non-Market apps (go to Settings, Applications, and check “Unknown Sources”).

Some other warnings and notes to consider about the build from Vukićević:

• 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.

He also notes that there’s an experimental version of Weave, Mozilla’s syncing tool that will work with this pre-Alpha build of Fennec. Visit this page and click on the “Experimental version” to find it.

Crunchbase

• MOZILLA
• FENNEC
• ANDROID

Company: Mozilla

Website: mozilla.org

Launch Date: February 1, 1998

Funding: $2.3M

Born from Netscape’s 1998 open sourcing of the code base behind its Netscape Communicator internet suite, Mozilla Firefox currently holds approximately 22.48% of the world market for internet browsers as of April 2009. Version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 after a series of name changes, and within a year close to 100 million downloads of the browser technology had occurred. The following two years saw upgrades to version 1.5 in November 2005 and 2.0 in October 2006....

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Product: Fennec

Company Mozilla

Fennec is the codename for Mozilla’s mobile browser, which is now simply called Firefox Mobile. It is available for Android and Maemo phones, and syncs your tabs, history, passwords, and other data with Firefox on the Web.

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Product: Android

Website: code.google.com

Company Google

Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards...

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