Until the recent release of Google's Chrome browser, the browser of choice for savvy computer and web users was Mozilla's Firefox browser. Though you will now find the occasional Chrome evangelist, Firefox continues to be the browser of the high-end user crowd. But, the high-end users have a problem. As power users, they are very likely to have mobile devices that access the web as well as the standard laptop and desktop computers. Thus, they need an Internet browser for their online activities. But, there is no mobile version of Firefox...yet.
Over at The Unwired, they got ahold of some screen shots this weekend of the hopefully soon to be announced Alpha version of the Firefox mobile web browser, code named Fennec. The vision of Fennec, according to the Mozilla Wiki dedicated to the mobile browser, is to bring a true web experience to mobile devices while, at the same time, using the device's innate features – for example, making a phone call based on a phone number on a webpage.
In addition, the mobile Firefox browser is slated to go where no browser has gone before with full support for web page technologies such as AJAX and JavaScript, which many mobile browser either do not support at all, or support only minimally.
Of course, one of the major benefits of Firefox is its extensibility via third-party extensions and add-ons. With this model, if a feature a user requires isn't in Firefox, chances are that someone has developed an add-on that can give it to you. Obviously, such extensions would need to be developed specifically for the mobile version of Firefox.
It is hard to judge any product based on screenshots alone, but it does appear that some of the ambitious goals for Firefox Mobile are close to being achieved. (Incidentally, the logo appears to be some form of large eared fox, which may give a clue to its eventual production name.)
It appears that Mobile Firefox will offer multiple options for viewing web based content. In one view, it appears that images and formatting are stripped out to allow for a quick, low bandwidth view of a web page. In the next screenshot, we see a view of the familiar Mozilla homepage rendered almost exactly like one would see it on a regular full computer browser albeit with some major scrolling required.
The last screenshot is particularly curious. The Acid3 Test is a browser test site which sends various objects and formatting to the browser based on accepted standards and then grades the browser on how well it does displaying those objects. The theory is that a browser that fully supports all standards and accepted web development practices would receive a 100. An 88 out of 100 is very impressive for a mobile browser. For reference, the full desktop version of Firefox only scores 71 in its current release while Google's Chrome scores 79 and Opera scores an 83. (The new Opera browser claims a 90+ score, and the Webkit development team claims a 100 score for their current development version.) Internet Explorer, long the bane of web developers, scores a paltry 14.
Let's hope this is a sign of pending release, and not some screenshot files created for some grant application.