Mobile/Fennec

Getting Started

See the Firefox Mobile web site to download Fennec and get more information.

About the Fennec Project

"Fennec" is the code name of the effort to build a mobile version of Firefox. Fennec is half of the Mozilla mobile effort to enable mobile phones with Mozilla software - for the other half, see Embedding.

Here are some key project pages:

• Fennec vision statement
• Fennec version 1 requirements
• Fennec user experience

Still have questions? See our FAQ for Mobile. If you're interested in what we'll be working on over the next 6 months or so, please see the project planning pages.

Goals

The overall goals for Mobile Firefox are:

• provide Mozilla’s standards-based open-source browser engine, optimized for mobile, that can be embedded by device manufacturers and others;
• a full-featured mobile browser including support for XUL-based add-ons, delivering on Firefox’s key principles of ease-of-use, security and accessibility;
• grow the Mozilla community in the mobile space;
• provide tools and documentation to help developers develop, debug and deploy web applications;
• do all of this work in the shared Mozilla source repositories so all platforms, desktop and mobile, benefit each other

For more background on our goals please see these blog posts.

Technical Details, Documents, & Designs

• Building extensions for Fennec
• Architecture overview of the front-end UI

Features

Firefox for mobile is packed with your favorite features, including:

• Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching
• Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience
• Add-ons – Customize your Firefox by adding small pieces of functionality, like games and news readers, that help make the mobile Web browser your own
• Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location
• Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next
• Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings
• Available in more than 30 languages and counting

See the complete list of Mobile Features.

Proposed Device + Location APIs

Supported Platforms

Firefox is available for Nokia Maemo platform on the Nokia N900. We’re also starting early development for the Android platform (pre-alpha). We will continue to investigate and consider other platforms that can support the full Firefox experience. Check out our Mobile Platforms and Projects Roadmap.

Earlier versions of Fennec were released for Windows Mobile 6, but we are no longer developing for Windows Mobile or Windows Phone. There is also an unofficial port for Palm webOS started by Dave Townsend (:Mossop).

Performance

Performance, memory consumption and on-device footprint are crucial to both embedders and Fennec.

• Performance/Memory issues
  • Startup optimization
  • XUL optimization
  • Memory optimization
  • Profiling
  • Memory reduction

Current blocking 1.9+ performance issues

UI discussions

• Designs for Non-touch-screen Phones
• Designs for Touch-screen Phones

Building/Running Fennec

• Ports, build instructions, platform support
• Download official builds for mobile and desktop platforms
• Miscellaneous tips and tricks

Testing Fennec

• Mobile QA Home
• /Cheat Codes for developers and testers
• Fennec 1.0 Test Plan
• Unit Test Automation (mochitest, chrome, reftest, crashtest, xpcshell)
• Running Mochitests on Fennec for Nokia
  
• Maemo 4 Test Farm Notes

Our first test page, post interesting urls here.

Test Builds

• Mozilla 1.9.2 (Fennec 1.1) nightly builds
• Trunk (Fennec 2.0) nightly builds
• Latest beta release builds

Bugs

Current mobile bugs