Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox, codenamed Fennec, is now available to download for Android 2 users.

Vladimir Vukićević, a developer at Mozilla, posted an update on his blog yesterday informing users about the progress that the project is making. Although this is still a pre-alpha build of Fennec, it gives a good idea of how the browser will look and feel as it continues to mature. Firefox fans should definitely try this out, although Vladimir did note a few potential issues in the post

  • We've only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
  • It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
  • Memory usage of this build isn't great -- in many ways it's a debug build, and we haven't really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
  • You'll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we're working to get rid of it.
  • You can't open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
  • This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device.
  • Edit: This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.

I’ve been using Fennec for a few hours now, and although it had crashed once or twice, the interface itself looks extremely promising, with uniquely designed slide out menus offering easy access to tabs and navigation.

You can download the package from Vladimir’s post or scan the QR code below using a Barcode Scanner app to download it straight to your phone.

Fennec Android QR code

Edit by Artem: I just tried this build on my Sprint Hero CDMA running Android 2.1 (via DamageControl) and it crashes almost instantly right after showing the first window.

Source: Vladimir Vukićević