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.

Opera Mobile 9.7

Last week saw the release of an Opera 10 beta, this week Opera have released a beta of mobile 9.7 (available for win mobile 6.1 only at the minute, a blackberry and android versions are in the works).
What surprised me a little was that we were in the middle of a beta for version 9.5, which has now disappeared with no update off Opera to the beta mailing list. The 9.5 beta hadn’t been updated since early February so it does make a little sense that the updates to the mobile version of Opera would result in a jump in version numbers. I download the update yesterday and i have to agree with Opera, the browsing speed has greatly improved even with their new turbo browsing feature turned off. Apart from the browsing speed I couldn’t tell much difference between 9.5 and 9.7 and the feature list is pretty much identical. One interesting addition in 9.7 is the inclusion of dragonfly (operas answer to firebug) Bug fixing via mobile hasn’t really been on my development check list, more of an after thought, but as more and more people use their mobiles for browsing I think Opera have pulled one out of the bag by including dragonfly with the browser.

Firefox 3.5:developer

Mozilla yesterday released a developer version (post-beta but pre-rc) of Firefox 3.5 to enable us to do some final testing before they push out the release candidate of 3.5.  As mentioned several time in the past, 3.5 brings a whole host of new features: html 5 entities, improved css, and not forgetting the almost mythical @font-face rule. All developers should digest the feature list soon as possible. The RC is expected to be released within the next week or two and a push to general release couple of weeks later. Download the latest release from the beta channel.

Safari 4

Apple also stuck their finger in the browser release pie by announcing an end of the Safari 4 beta at their Worldwide Developers Conference. Safari 4 also includes more  support for html5 and css3 entities and its own version of PORN private browsing mode.  You can download Safari 4 direct from the safari homepage or read more about “whats in” safari on the new features page, although not much it seems…

Google Chrome

It wouldnt be fair to not  mention  an update for Google Chrome while Im talking about browser updates. While their hasnt been all that much pumping out of the developer channel for chrome recently there has been some good news for linux and mac fans. Early developer builds of chrome are now available for both platforms but developers have urged your to NOT download them, unless of course you enjoy potential crashes and an incomplete browser. Might be worth a dabble tho…

We have been waiting for a mobile version of Firefox since forever, currently on WM6.1 we have a choice between using Internet Explorer 6 Mobile or Opera Mobile, There are some other browsers available but none that really tear people away from IE or Opera.  While Opera Mobile is vastly superior to IE6mobile and renders pages as a desktop browser does, it unfortunately comes with a small price tag unless bundled with your operator and so means a lot of people are stuck using IE. Fennec is about to change all that.

I’ve been playing with Fennec since its release on the 15th and  I have to say its rather good. Navigation is quick to respond and doesn’t take long to get used to, like existing mobile browser users swipe and tap the screen to pan and zoom in on pages, tabs and menu items are available by pulling the left and right edges of the screen respectively, to open side menus, this works well on a mobile device as you save space for viewing the website,  although I did find when reading some pages I accidentally opened the menus more than I’d liked.

Websites load as expected and without any particular long load times, other than the expected result of mobile browsing, I tested via WI-FI and didn’t notice any load time at all, built in javascript engine was able to handle some very javascript heavy sites like Facebook with out giving up in the way mobile IE does. I could even get Youtube working once I’d enabled plug-ins.

There is support for basic add-ons and as mentioned before tabbed browsing, both of which help to improve the mobile browsing experience although opera has had both these (tabs and widgets) for a while, Fennec seems to load them quicker than the version of opera i have installed.

The only problems i found while testing fennec were a result of my win mobile device, it seems to use a lot of memory which my poor tytnII doesnt have much of spare, am sure on the newer win mobile devices it runs fine.

Overall for an alpha development Im very impressed, the basics are already in place and Im looking forward to the next release.

Fennec is available to download here or if you don’t have a win mobile device you can install it to your desktop by grabbing a copy of the fennec desktop build.

Watch a walk through of  the new features included in the Win Mobile Alpha build courtesy of Madhava Enros