By Fennec for Android development is always moving along, and we’re always right there with the Firefox for Mobile team to follow. The latest says that the latest nightly Fennec builds – while still rough in a few places – is otherwise completely usable. The app is expected to enter 2.0 alpha stages in the coming weeks – just ahead of a beta stage they expect will head our way this fall. If things go according to plan, it sounds like we might be seeing Fennec officially released at least before the end of Q4.
New features (in alpha or planned) include Firefox sync, Find-In-Page, link sharing, autofilling using information from your address book, and multi-touch gestures (alongside the already implemented pinch-to-zoom). Things are beginning to come along nicely, it seems, and while I’ve held off on downloading the alpha before, the 2.0 version just might be enough to get me to check it out.
For more details on the latest out of Mozilla, head over to developer Matt Brubeck’s site now.
[via IntoMobile]
By the time Fennec actually comes out I’ll be SO over it that I won’t want to use it. I mean, they’ve been talking about it for the past two years now. Why in the heck is it taking so long? In this day and age you don’t work on something for two years and put it out – by then it’s obsolete. You get it working fast and make it available. Then you release updates as you develop new things.
Get with the program Mozilla!
@Daryl or, rather, you just work on it without saying anything and announce it when you’re close to delivering. That’s actually what most developers do (just like Rome, apps – at least the good ones – aren’t built in a day), but everything Mozilla does is open-sourced and that requires visibility and transparency.
Please, let the user agent string be iPhone like or at least make it customizable!
Have they gotten the size down from 25 meg? Cause seriously….25meg? I know its Alpha and all but I’m not going to even try it out until its at least below 15….
@Matt
FYI, here’s the nightly builds — http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-android-r7/
Stop whining about the size of an alpha-debug build? Seriously, whats wrong with you? It’s a pretty common size for a build with loads of testing in it.
@Matt you have an SD card, even 8GB cards are cheap. Why do you care about a measly 25MB?
mattsux, they’ve been saying that for years but Firefox is still clunky and slow as molasses. That’s why everyone else has moved on to webkit.
@ari-free webkit? Ah you mean apples fork of KHTML. I love how they take credit for that.
chromium :)