The Alpha release of the next major version of Fennec is now available for Android and Nokia N900 users to
download and test.
Fennec (codename for Firefox mobile) is the first mobile browser to offer add-ons and is built on the same technology that powers desktop Firefox.
Fennec Alpha now creates one fluid Web experience between desktop and mobile devices by providing Firefox Sync built-in into the browser, which provides access to Awesome Bar browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs.
The main focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness to user actions. This is being implemented using two major technologies, "Electrolysis" and "Layers." This Alpha release includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive JavaScript is running, Mozilla said. The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of Layers to improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video.
Mozilla is also working to optimize these actions using the hardware-accelerated graphics rendering capabilities showing up in today?s mobile devices.
See the
release notes for a full list of features with this release.