Friday saw the release of a third alpha build of Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile browser, I have spent my weekend browsing useing this latest build rather than the much favoured Opera Mobile and I have to say well done to the Fennec dev team.

This latest build see’s imp0rovment over the supported screen resolutions which means on my TYTN II, I can finally use Fennec in portrait mode and also view the options screen So far development on the Windows Mobile build have only been officially supported on the HTC Touch Pro, this latest build now supports the resolution of pretty much all the Windows Mobile based phones of the last couple of years.

The biggest update in this release is noted as being the start-up time. Although to be honest I haven’t noticed any difference myself, there had also been the addition of tile caching, similar to Google Maps, in order to speedup the rendering of pages and cut down on the work Fennec must do, you can read more about the tile caching on Roy Frostig blog

The only downside I could find with this latest release is that the ability to zoom appears to have disappeared, double-clicking on the screen makes it flicker but nothing happens.

If you want to read more on this latest release, see the offical blog post, the release notes and better yet, download the cab installer.