Chicago (IL) - Although mobile Firefox, dubbed Fennec, has just entered into its first beta, we can already tell it is set to alter the mobile browsing landscape in a big way -- probably bigger than how Firefox progressed browsing on our desktop computers. The new beta enhances bookmark management and brings notable speed improvements -- thanks to TraceMonkey. Plugins are also enabled, making Flash video, PDFs and other plugin-based web content easily viewable. The support for Mozilla's add-ons platform alone puts Fennec far ahead of other mobile browsers, enabling a personalized browsing environment just as with desktop Firefox.

After eleven development milestone, Mozilla released the first official beta of mobile Firefox, dubbed Fennec. The good news is that Fennec Beta 1 remains focused on speed optimizations: The browser starts faster than before, zooms and pans around pages smoother. It also has a friendlier settings UI, an improved title bar with access to multiple search engines and bookmark folders. Fennec Beta 1 also has nicer features from previous releases, like password and download managers, themes support, geolocation APIs, tabbed browsing with thumbnails and clean UI optimized for pages by moving tabs and controls to vertically aligned columns outside screen boundaries, allowing you to reveal them with swipe gesture. The bad news is, you don't get to run Fennec on your iPhone -- thanks to Apple's policies.

Although Apple approved several third-party browsers into its App Store, these are all WebKit-based. Their App Store rules prohibit apps from using frameworks other than those provided in the official iPhone SDK. And since Fennec packs quite a few non-Apple-approved technologies, for example it's built on the Gecko rendering engine and XUL-based add-ons platform like desktop Firefox coupled to its TraceMonkey Javascript engine, Apple says "NO" to the competition.

On a brighter note, you can run Fennec Beta 1 natively on Maemo-powered Nokia N8xx Internet tablets. Mozilla said version 1.0 will run on a range of mobile devices powered by Windows Mobile (HTC Touch Pro), Symbian (Nokia N95) and Linux -- effectively giving Fennec access to two thirds of the mobile market. There are also test versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux desktop that mimic the mobile environment. There will be at least two more betas and one release candidate before Fennec ships sometime in 2009. Here's what you can expect from this first official beta release.

CLEAN USER INTERFACE
Mobile Firefox maximizes screen real estate for viewing pages by moving all controls to vertically aligned columns outside screen boundaries. Swipe left to reveal tabs with thumbnails, right for other browsing options.
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Code base: Optimized for speed

As the browser enters beta testing, developers are focusing on performance. As such, Beta 1 packs substantial optimizations compared with its previous alpha releases. Mozilla claims that optimizations to Fennec's front-end code, combined with platform tweaks, make Beta 1 boot and render pages faster while keeping the UI more responsive -- all of which is true. You'll also notice smoother page zooming and panning.

Mozilla has pledged to keep identifying performance hotspots and tweak the underlying code until the final version comes out -- sometime later this year.

TraceMonkey: Online

Mozilla had previously introduced an optimized Javascript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into full view with Firefox 3.1. This boosted the speed of Javascript-based sites like Gmail and Facebook. Instead of parsing, analyzing and then executing the natural language-based Javascript code line by line (old school way), code which looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
function PrintDate() {
today = new Date();
document.write('Date: ', today.getMonth()+1, '/', today.getDate(), '/', today.getYear());
}
</script>

The new TraceMonkey engine first turns Javascript commands into byte-codes, which are an intermediary representation suitable for much faster execution. It's like a run-time compile. It converts the text-based, human-readable Javascript source code into a machine-readable binary program.

The arrival of TraceMonkey in Fennec Beta 1 is a big step forward that will hopefully trigger a new speed race that will benefit consumers greatly -- like when optimized Javascript engines in desktop Safari and Firefox ignited speed race on your desktop. Oh, the excitement!

Nevertheless, don't expect TraceMonkey in Fennec to automagically run complex sites the way desktop Firefox does. Due to the constrained mobile CPU and GPU resources, it may struggle with even moderately complex pages. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the TraceMonkey platform into Fennec shows Mozilla's devotion to speeding up mobile apps, and is a step in right direction that already enables more responsive and efficient mobile browsing. It's also strategic move that ensure Fennec's competitiveness in mid- and long-term, raising the ladder in terms of what mobile browser should be.

Read on the next page: Plugins, Bookmarks management, Extensions