While we’ve reported Mozilla’s Fennec browser being leaked and compiled in the past, the company has just released a “pre-alpha” version of the browser to the public. Those who wish to grab the .apk and start browsing can do so by visiting this text link from your phone. The release comes via the blog of Vladimir Vukicevic, an “Infrastructuralist” at Mozilla whose blog has a fair amount of posts about Firefox’ little cousin.
Support includes installing extensions, which I find very cool. Warnings abound: it’s extremely buggy at the moment, but right now I’d take something from the developer over some fan-compiled projects.
This build should be considered “pre-alpha”, so there are some warnings and caveats:
- 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.
- This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device
Vladimir Vukićević
