Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocketnow com Mozilla is working on bringing Firefox to mobile devices they try this with windows mobile with fennec and they're stopping development of that because Windows Phone 7 is coming just around the corner and now they have a version or at least an alpha for Android let's take a look at how it works okay so I'm gonna start off by opening it here and it's kind of buggy but you can actually use it a lot more than you could use the fennec alpha for windows mobile that we showed you a few times in the past so here we are the big story with fennec or let's call it firefox mobile is that you'll be able to install add-ons and extension so if you have firefox installed on your desktop you know that you probably use a variety of customizations whether you have a twitter plugin that automatically shows you your tweets somewhere in the browser or maybe you have an ad blocker or maybe you have a way to synchronize your passwords and bookmarks across multiple computers that's really the promise with fennec so let's take a look at how it works as a web browser i'm going to click up into the awesome bar as they call it i can search right from this bar or i can sweat to the right and see all of my bookmarks so i'm going to jump right to amazon.com and hide the keyboard away and let's see we're over an hsdpa connection right now so not as fast as Wi-Fi but still pretty good okay so rendering speed is pretty good and it's kind of surprising for an alpha it's really close to the default android browser it doesn't have pinch-to-zoom support so we have to double tap to zoom in and we get pretty close and panning and scrolling looks quite nice on this early version of firefox mobile now we can open up multiple tabs I love the way that this manages tabs you just swipe to the left and you can see your open tabs and I'm going to go to pocket now calm a lot of other mobile browsers sort of sort of hide the tabs behind a menu so it's really not intuitive to quickly jump between multiple tabs like you would on a desktop browser okay so here's pocket now again it's coming up pretty fast actually has landscape support or accelerometer support and here it is flash does not work no word on whether they plan to integrate flash into this product if we get down to a YouTube video here it says click here to install the plug-in and when you click there nothing really happens so I can swipe to the left and quickly toggle between amazon and pocket now calm very smoothly i really enjoy how quickly you can do that if we swipe to the right we get some other things we can favorite quickly or unfavorite by just tapping on the star and I'm gonna favorite like I just did if I tap on this little gear here I get the settings so here there's some basic settings you can show images enable javascript allow cookies basic browser stuff but here's where sort of the meat of the application is it's any add-ons and extensions manager and right now it's trying to find add-ons and it's not going to because there really aren't any add-ons that will work right now with fennec seats s bennett could not retrieve add-ons but hopefully in the future that will change and you'll be able to get a lot of the great add-ons and extensions that you use on the mobile on the on the full version of firefox on the desktop on the mobile browser another promise of fennec is through weave which is bookmark syncing so it's an extension for firefox although there's a lot of different extensions that will do this but weave is made by Mozilla and it allows you to keep your bookmarks up to date on all of your devices so soon you'll be able to keep all of your bookmarks up to date on your mobile phone on your desktop anywhere that you're running a mozilla product so overall the outfit is actually not too bad and it's it's it's usable but probably not as your daily driver in terms of a browser but we like where mozilla is going with fennec mobile hopefully they continue on the development path and they come out with a final product like they unfortunately never did for windows mobile i mean i'll post a link on pocketnow.com on how to get fennec alpha for your device and please thumbs up this video if you liked it that's it for now