Firefox through their developer Vladimir Vukicevic have announced that they are finally coming out with their new browser for the Android platform for use on cellular phones. Firefox have decided to release a pre alpha version of Fennec made to run on Android 2.0 and above. Further more according to reports the full Mozilla Firefox may hit the Android and not just the Fennec.

Fennec brings with itself certain new functions in this version with side to side swiping to access the functionality. On it, we have to tug the screen to the right to access the tabs and to the left if we want to access the settings, bookmarks and the toolbar with various options.

Since this Fennec project is a pre alpha edition and hence is still at a nascent stage of development, this software still has a large number of bugs like slow start up speed, slow response and high memory usage which are yet to be resolved.

This version of Fennec has been tested on the HTC Desire and the Motorola Milestone other than the Droid and Nexus One phones. In spite of these tests, the Fennec producers have actually confirmed that this browser still has a lot of shortcomings and is still not ready for everyday use but is open to users who are interested in using the pre alpha version and giving feed back for further development of the software.

This browser also cannot be stored on the phone’s SD card and has to be installed in the phone memory as it takes up a huge amount of space and if it is stored in the SD card it will eat a lot of memory causing the phone to crash, where the phone might not respond or a black screen may be shown. In such a case one may just go to their Android settings and select applications-then select Manage Applications and then go to Fennec and then tap on Force stop. In the worst case one can simply uninstall and reinstall the application and they can easily get rid of our profile and saved data.

The interface for this Fennec looks very much like the earlier version which was released for the Maemo platform. Other problems with this software include its inability to open links from other applications. This will however be ironed out in the next version which is to be launched. This pre alpha of Fennec does provide plug ins to certain Mozilla facilities like the Firefox Weave. This is a Mozilla extension which lets the user access tabs from the Firefox on the desktop and also the tabs we open from the mobile browser. This version of Weave which is available with this browser is an experimental version and hence there are teething issues with this. Other plug ins which is available for the browser is the Youtube enabler and the Twitter Bar which allows us to send tweets by typing into the browser’s address bar.