Notices

From the Mozilla Blog

Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo! Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s director of mobile engineering, explains more about the exciting new features and improvements to performance in his blog post, excerpted below.

We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes. A lot of work has been done to make our theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release. Overall, this beta is a major improvement to previous Fennec betas.

Moving forward, we’re going to focus on fixing polish bugs, rough edges, and taking advantage of things like our new tile system to help avoid the user seeing a checkerboard while panning.

For more information, check out the developer release notes.

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I just installed it. Seems to work nice, but I feel like it loads the pages too slow...

And I remember the last version was 11 MB, this one is 1 MB

now thats a fat burning exercise for the stars

ugh, dont trust app manager to report sizes correctly!

first of, the size reported in the list is the combined download size of the selected package and any dependencies not already installed. Secondly, said size may well expand to twice that size, as the content of the packages come compressed and is uncompressed as part of the install.

all in all, the reason fennec came up as 1MB, is because there probably was no need to update xulrunner, the part that really adds size to the whole thing...

Yeah, it's 1MB if you already have xulrunner installed. If you don't, get ready for the 11MB install. Just removing Fennec won't remove xulrunner. You have uninstall it separately.

Anyway, I won't test it. No more room on my internal and I don't want to uninstall anything at this time. Once the install has been cutdown a bit, I'll download and install. Until then, Tear and MicroB will power my device.

Jesse~

Uh-oh! I guess I'm out too then... 10 MB is a lot for me right now also.

It was good while it lasted

actually fennec can spice up a roast quite nicely-that and a drop of red wine

Weird. Most sites load ok, but unlike Beta 2, I can't load http://jquery.com. Likewise, I can't type anything into the text box on Google. I understand that I can type into the main app text bar and click the Google button, but the UX in that decision is quite frustrating. (I forget if this is how it worked in Beta 2.) Pages are loading quick enough for me compared with other tablet browsers, though.

Installing the URL Fixer plugin was flawless -- pretty cool, too.

Zooming in and navigating pages works pretty good -- although, it is slower than page loads (which is weird). This will have to be sped up (a lot) if they want it to be usable. Clicking small hyperlinks is nearly impossible without zooming in.

Javascript in general is pretty darn slow (try doing some of the demos at http://mootools.net). My Weblog crashed the browser, although it did load when it was the first site I went to after launch.

Html rendering seems to be pretty good, but not in all cases.

Overall, the new Beta seems to have polished some edges, but it still needs work. (In fact, some of my notes above are because it feels like there have been a few steps back between the last version and this one.)

Tim

Fennec has improved, but still it's much too slow. Makes me see the checkerboard too often. I have too stay with Midori which is much faster.

I like the design but It's too slow to continuous use. After they get the bugs sorted out this could be a great browser.