Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"The results from the Mozilla Creative Collective's "Firefox Goes Mobile" design challenge are in, and I'm happy to announce that the winner is "Pocketfox", by Yaroslaff Chekunov. As the official emblem of the upcoming mobile version of Firefox, we'll be using this image as an avatar on social networking sites, on mozilla.com, on t-shirts and more. It makes a great addition to our portfolio of Firefox imagery!"

Somehow, hiding in a pocket isn't quite what I expected - but I'm not sure any of the runners-up were any better in capturing what Firefox could potentially bring to mobile browsing. At least, this has the advantage of simplicity. Agree, disagree? Sound off in the comments.

Mozilla is making progress on the Fennec Browser for Windows Mobile. This alpha release features improved start times and panning support, as well as greater support for different screen resolutions. Since this is still an alpha release, try at your own risk and a backup of your data is definitely called for. One thing to note is that Fennec is aimed at devices with at least 128MB RAM, so don't install it if you have less than that.

"Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the release of two milestones for the Fennec project - Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. Additionally, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux."

Anyone brave enough to try this? The improvements from the first alpha include a revamped UI, fixing usability issues and improving performance (more details in this blog post). What with the tremendous strides other mobile browsers have made in the past year or two, Fennec better be something really special, or it's going to be a non-starter when it finally releases.

"We are pleased to announce that Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile 6 is available for download by developers and testers. This is an early developer release intended for testing purposes only. We would like to invite interested Windows Mobile developers and users to join with Mozilla's developer and user community to help develop, test and refine the product."

Right now it's just for touch-enabled devices, but Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser has just hit alpha and is available for download. Just be aware that alpha means it's still unfinished and likely full of bugs, but it seems the feature set has been frozen and it's just performance and bug quashing from here on. If you're brave enough to have a go, remember to drop us a line and tell us how well it works...or doesn't as the case may be. Just remember to back up your data first!

"It's looking more and more like Mozilla is ready to really do this: Late last night, the organization posted the first public beta of the browser that could end up being "Firefox Mobile." It still goes by the code name Fennec, and the first beta is testing whether touchscreen mobile users will be willing to have literally all their browser functions be placed off-screen, if it makes room for more elements of the Web page."

What I find interesting - and impressive - is that Fennec is going to have TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine that will come with Firefox 3.5. Usually mobile components tend to be stripped down, pale shadows of their desktop counters - it's nice to see the Mozilla developers putting performance at the forefront. Right now the beta is only for desktop Windows, which surprises me a little bit - you'd think that the beta stage was when they'd be ready to do the on device testing after the desktop testing in the Alpha stage. Still, I'm thrilled to see Fennec starting to gain some momentum - with the continued fumbling by Microsoft in getting a great mobile browser into the hands of its customers, it's nice to see another option coming for us to use.

"Well the mobile browser world will likely be in for some serious churn now that Mozilla's Firefox, codenamed "Fennec", is throwing its hat into the ring. Mozilla's Tristan Nitot commented that not only is the mobile browser in the works, but that its expected to arrive for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Linux. Though, the rub here is that we'll need to wait until sometime in 2010 to see this live, and honestly, we may have HTC handsets integrated into our minds well before then."

It amazes me that we have been hearing about a mobile Internet browser from Mozilla for years and the soonest it will be available will be 2010! By that time Opera and all the WebKit variants will have a strangle-hold on the mobile browsing market – at least on the Smartphone side of things. There might even be a sliver a hope that by 2010 Microsoft would have already released Windows Mobile 7 and be on the way to announcing Windows Mobile 8 which hopefully will have a new and improved browser. 2010 is a little late to be jumping into the mobile Internet ring in my opinion but who knows, there is still a chance they might come out with something incredibly awesome and do to the mobile world what they have done to the Desktop world.

"Firefox Mobile, as outlined in the video above, doesn’t look quite as revolutionary but it does look like it will fill some holes currently found in comparable offerings such as Nokia’s S60 Browser and Apple’s mobile Safari. The GUI looks very cool, though raw, and Mozilla appears to be on the right path toward optimizing user experience and accommodating for small screen sizes."


Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The only thing I can say is...I want! The browser wars seem to be making a comeback - Opera 9.5 last week, Firefox 3 tomorrow, and the mobile versions coming soon. If there's one thing that could really ignite mass-market adoption of smartphones (for those of us without access to an iPhone that is), it'd be a decent web-experience on a mobile device. I like the idea of panning and the bookmark/tab canvas, but I'm holding comment as to how it'd work on a "real" device - my instinct tells me it'll be resource intensive. Still, Firefox Mobile really breaks away from the traditional browser/user interaction in some ways, and it'll be interesting to see how this will pan out.