Mozilla Invades Android, Nokia's N900 With Alpha Build of Fennec 2

From DailyTech: The first sign of the shift to mobile computing could perhaps be seen when laptop sales surpassed desktop sales for the first time ever in the last calendar quarter of 2008. Or perhaps it was when was when cell phone subscribers surpassed land line subscribers in 2009.

Today with the soaring popularity of tablet devices and smartphones, it's clear that mobile designs are being favored for the majority of use cases over larger stationary ones. That spells trouble for desktop software makers. Among those feeling the crunch is Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser.

While Mozilla has the second most popular browser in the PC (desktop/laptop) market, it has hardly made a dent in the mobile browsing market dominated by Opera (Opera Mini, Mobile), Apple (Mobile Safari), and Google (Android browser). Mozilla hopes to change that and just took a big step forward, releasing alpha builds of the next major version of Fennec browser (2.0) for Android and Nokia's N900 smartphone.

Fennec 2.0 is a ground-up effort that creates an efficient Firefox-like browser tooled for a multitouch-driven mobile environment. It boasts the distinction of being the first mobile browser to support ad-ons (bad news for those looking to advertise to the mobile sector) and uses Firefox Sync to share Awesome Bar browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs with your PC.

To improve performance, Fennec 2.0 runs two process in a method it calls "Electrolysis". One process performs the rendering of Web content and running Javascript. Another takes user input and supports core functionality. Mozilla says the feature makes Fennec much more fast and responsive than the average mobile browser.

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