Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocket now calm and this is a look at fennec alpha 3 this is basically Mozilla's Firefox for mobile devices now we've shown you videos of alpha one out the 2 and now our alpha 3 and what's different is really a lot of bug fixes so they've improved panning and scrolling they've improved startup time revised theme improved you I polish and things like that overall it's not too too different from alpha 2 so if you've tested that before it's very similar but we'll take a look and see if we notice anything terribly different okay so let's test out that improve startup time we're going to tap on this little fennec icon here and see how long it takes okay so that it was about 11 seconds and if you think about it opera mobile is about six seconds so it's still slow but compared to previous alphas of fennec it's a lot faster so let's go to a website let's start off by tapping on the awesome bars they call it up here and let's go to you can see some sights I've been to already let's go to msn com okay here we have msn loaded and just like on the desktop version of Firefox you get the little fav icon up here at the top if you type if you tap on the fav icon you get a little bit more information about the site's security certificate from here we can swipe to the right to get a list of tabs we can open up a new tab and we can start typing let's go straight to pocket now swipe to the right to get that to close in here we are with pocketnow.com loaded and of course we can tap to drag and it takes a little while to redraw the screen it doesn't have flash support so you see the little you know click here to enable the plug-in notification there to zoom in on a column you DoubleTap just like other mobile browsers and it tries to refit it although it's a little bit slower than opera mobile s you can see there a double tap to zoom out again and at this point things seem very much similar to what they looked like in alpha 1 and alpha 2 the tabs are about the same they perform a little bit better let's go into settings and see if anything is different there of course we swipe to the to the left this time to get settings and settings is down here and actually can jump up to favorites right here by tapping on the star and you can actually add a favorite by doing that let's go down to the Settings button and they've moved the location of the icons and now they're on the bottom they used to be on the left side so they really optimized page space now they have this kind of yes no toggle switch really to turn on and off images enable javascript enabled plugins and one of the great things about fennec when it's finally fully developed is that you'll be able to get a lot of plugins for it and customize the browsing experience kind of like you can do on firefox on the desktop the second tab will show you the plugins and allow you to search for plugins out we did a video about this in alpha 2 right now there are only about 10 plugins that you can yet for fennec it's not like you can get the many thousands that you can get for the desktop and I'm not going to tap on that icon because it seems to freeze this device every time I do that's another bug let's go to the one to the right of the plugins icon it just shows you all of your downloads if you've recently downloaded some files and to the right of that is really the first screen that we saw with all of the options to change the various settings so fennec alpha 3 is not that much better than previous versions there are probably a lot of under the hood bug fixes but from the end-user perspective it's really not that different and there's still a lot of room left to make improvement obviously this is an alpha it's not even in beta yet so the Mozilla developers know this but at this point there's still a lot left to be desired and and it's far from being able to be used as a daily driver because there's just so many problems with bugs and things just not working very well so we'll keep an eye on the development of Venice we'll be back when there is a new build to talk about that's it for now