Mozilla has been making significant headway with its mobile browsing efforts. Building on the extensive work that was done to reduce Firefox's memory consumption leading up to the 3.0 release, Mozilla aims to bring a desktop-like browsing experience to handheld devices. The organization launched the
Fennec project to begin experimenting with mobile platform portability and with mobile user interface concepts.
When we took our first look at Fennec earlier this year, we pointed to work done by developer Brad Lassey to port XULRunner and Gecko to Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. These efforts have accelerated and the results are extremely impressive. Screenshots posted this weekend by Lassey and other developers demonstrate the Fennec browser, including both the renderer and the user interface, running on Windows Mobile devices.
In a recent screenshot, he shows the browser's current status on Acid 3, a test devised by the Web Standards Project to help browser implementors evaluate the extent of their compliance with certain web standards. Fennec on Windows Mobile scores 88 out of 100 on the test. This puts it ahead off Opera Mobile 9.51, which scores 71 out of 100.
Mozilla is also working on an ARM port of Tracemonkey, Firefox's new high-performance JavaScript engine. Some early benchmarks that were published last month are extremely impressive. The developers say that there is still plenty of room for further optimization.
Mozilla is clearly serious about bringing the full power of Firefox to multiple mobile platforms. The open source web browser is evolving quickly and could soon be a serious competitor to Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile devices.
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