I’m still not sure if this will take off or not – but I have so many bookmarks, plugins and other junk that I’ve accumulated over the years of tweaking Firefox that the prospect of being able to port that user environment over to my mobile device is intoxicating.
The release is codenamed Fennec, and one of its coolest features is that on touchscreen phones, when you swipe from side to side on the screen, that will bring up the menus for tabs, bookmarks and settings. Which has long been one of the thorniest issues for me on mobile browsers – I’ve gotten spoiled with the real estate on desktop web displays (well, ever since I upgraded to a Dell 24″ monitor), and the narrowness of the mobile web has meant for a lot more poking and pecking at tiny buttons with my 2XLT fingers.
This Fennec logo looks kinda like one of the logos you'd see on a cheesy 70s superhero show, where some batwing-eared alien race is secretly plotting world domination. Which is actually kinda cool, really.
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. The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of Layers to greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video.
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developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach many millions of devices.
The other exciting prospect for designers is that if you are able to design for Firefox’s quirks on the desktop web, you should (if there was a way to make that should stick out even more without invoking a blink or marquee tag, I would) be able to just downsize a bit for the mobile browser. Or, given the rapid rate at which screen resolutions on handhelds is increasing, maybe not even have to change the layout all that much.
