Early Mozilla mobile browser has 'showstopper' flaw

From InfoWorld: Early adopters who downloaded the application after it was announced Feb. 10 found it essentially doesn't work. "The bad news is the browser is basically useless for many people," Mark Finkle, a Fennec developer, wrote in a blog post describing the problem.

The episode doesn't bode well for Mozilla, which has already faltered with previous mobile browsing efforts and is lagging behind competitors including Opera, Apple's Safari ,and IE Mobile, which are securing footholds among mobile users.

For many people who tried Fennec on Windows Mobile, the browser loaded only a checkerboard pattern image any time they tried to open a Web page.

Finkle suspects the problem is related to restrictions that Windows Mobile puts on memory use. Fennec developers are working on ways to get around those restrictions to solve the problem, he said.

When Fennec developers released the browser, they said it wasn't meant to be a broad release, but they hoped early adopters would try it and offer feedback about how it works.

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