Mozilla Releases New Version of Fennec Mobile Browser

Mozilla’s long-under-development mobile browser, Fennec, is now in its second alpha phase. Fennec Alpha 2 was officially released this week, taking the focus away for a brief moment from the Firefox 3.1 beta progress.

The Mozilla team says the updated Fennec contains huge performance updates, with faster startup times, better panning and zooming, and better responsiveness while pages are loading.

“We’ve re-factored a significant amount of the front end code resulting in substantial speed improvements as well providing a much better base for extension authors to build upon,” says Stuart Parmenter, Fennec engineering manager.

The Fennec Alpha 2 release is accompanied by an updated desktop version with support for Windows, OS X, and Linux. The desktop version is designed primarily with third-party extension developers in mind, to make testing easier.

Mozilla says its Windows Mobile build is seeing “great progress,” and work is now also beginning on a Symbian version of the program.

More information as well as download links can be found here.