Early Version of Mobile Firefox Will Be Released Soon

The long wait for Mobile Firefox is almost over. The Mozilla Foundation will soon make an alpha version of this web browser available to anyone brave enough to install it.

Work on this project has been going on for more than a year. According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, the alpha version -- code-named Fennec -- will be released in the next few weeks. Anyone who wants to will be able to download it, but they should be aware that this version will almost certainly very unstable and bug-prone.

Bug reports will help the developers improve the application for a later beta release. The full version isn't expected until 2009.

This browser will be available for at least two mobile operating systems. "Although Fennec is still only targeted for the Nokia N8x0, that should be changing fairly soon. Work on Windows Mobile has heated up quite a bit," Mark Finkle recently wrote in his blog.  Finkle is a Platform Evangelist at the Mozilla Corporation.

A screenshot of Fennec running on a Nokia Internet Tablet is below:

The Goal of Firefox Mobile

In a recent interview, Mozilla's Lilly told Linux Insider his group's goal:

We want to make sure that the Web on mobile is more like the Web than what the mobile industry offers today, which is closed, separate networks, and not a very good information-getting experience for the user. The first thing is to bring Firefox to mobile devices.

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Thanks to yorker for the tip.