First look: Mozilla Fennec takes browser fight to handhelds
With Firefox 3 right around the corner, Mozilla's top lizard wranglers are turning their attention to the next step in their plans for world browser domination. The Mozilla Mobile initiative, which was first announced last October, has reached the functional prototype stage. The developers now have released pre-alpha test builds of a mobile Firefox prototype, codenamed Fennec, which we tested and discussed with Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan.
We initially viewed the Mozilla Mobile initiative with skepticism because it seemed unlikely that Firefox would be able to compete with WebKit or Opera in performance and memory efficiency. Significant improvements in these areas have eliminated the basis for skepticism and dramatically boosted the viability of Firefox in the mobile arena. Adoption of jemalloc and several other memory optimizations have reduced Firefox's footprint. JavaScript performance has also been improved significantly since the early alpha releases.
In a recent blog entry, Mozilla technical evangelist Chris Blizzard notes that the optimization work has produced even more gains on ARM than on x86. The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet comes with a browser called MicroB which uses a fork of Firefox's Gecko rendering engine that dates back to the earliest Firefox 3 alpha series. Comparing MicroB with the latest build of Fennec on an N810 provides some insight into just how much mobile Firefox performance has improved during the Firefox 3 development cycle. Blizzard ran SunSpider benchmark tests with both browsers on the N810 and found that Fennec's JavaScript execution performance is 5.9 times faster than that of MicroB.
Future development
We talked to Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan about the current status of Fennec and about plans for future development. "The current build you've got is really just a starting point to give us a framework to start experimenting, doing performance tests, etc." Sullivan told us. "It's a true peek under the hood, and you're able to get that peek because of the unique level of openness we have at Mozilla."
Sullivan explained that the Fennec project aims to bring the desktop Firefox user experience to handheld devices but will focus on meeting the unique requirements of mobile computing users. "Our goal on mobile is to embody the principles that have made Firefox so successful on the desktop, but with the recognition that mobile is different—not so much in that it presents some constraints, but in that it enables new types of experiences, and people's interaction with these devices are different than when they're sitting at their desks," he says. "Web compatibility, security, performance, support for rich internet apps will all be key."
Interface innovation is a big part of the agenda, and there are plenty of creative concepts that Mozilla hopes to test in the mobile space. When we looked at Mozilla Labs research projects last month, we examined some of the emerging plans for using services like Weave to create a seamless transition between desktop and mobile browsing. Mozilla will also work on improving basic usability in mobile environments. "With existing mobile browsers, it's hard to do basic things like enter URLs, navigate around rich pages, switch between multiple pages, and in general the browser is in a silo separate from the rest of what the phone can do," Sullivan comments. "We're doing some creative thinking about how to make it easier to get to the content you care about, easier to navigate within those pages, easier to seamlessly move between your PC and your phone."
Much of the Firefox user interface is constructed with XUL, an XML-based user interface description language. This makes Firefox very easy to customize and extend. Mozilla hopes to leverage this advantage to encourage experimentation with new mobile user interface concepts. Developers can augment or reinvent the Fennec user interface by modifying the browser.xul file in the Fennec chrome directory and the associated browser.css file. Additional functionality can be implemented in JavaScript by modifying the browser.js file. Fennec will eventually support a complete extension system like Firefox 3 that developers will be able to use for modifying the browser's behavior and user interface.
"Another exciting thing is that we're providing full support for add-ons," Sullivan notes. "These will fall into three buckets: most add-ons will just work out of the box; some won't make much sense away from a PC; and a whole new class will be created that are going to be new for mobile."
There are other aspects of the Mozilla Mobile initiative that will appeal to developers as well. Mobile software development is hard, and Mozilla could potentially offer a novel approach to simplifying the process. The underlying XUL technology on which the Firefox interface is built can be used independently with a XULRunner runtime to create platform-neutral mobile applications with XML and JavaScript.
Mozilla developer Brad Lassey has provided some Maemo XULRunner builds that can be used to run desktop XUL applications directly on Nokia Internet Tablet devices. Mozilla's XULRunner guru, Mark Finkle, is very excited about the possibilities for mobile XUL development and wrote in a recent blog entry that there are plans for improving XUL integration with the Maemo platform.
Lassey has also had some success with an experimental attempt at creating XULRunner builds for Windows Mobile 6, which demonstrates XULRunner's innate platform neutrality. Imagine being able to create a XUL-based application that can seamlessly run on all three major desktop operating systems and multiple mobile platforms. Platform-specific user interface customizations would be as easy as writing up CSS stylesheets.
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