Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukićević has successfully ported (Fennec) Firefox to Google’s Android mobile operating system.
“Over the last few months, we’ve made some great progress on bringing Firefox to Android,” Vukićević wrote in an official blog post.
“Michael Wu, Brad Lassey, Alex Pakhotin and I have been focusing on getting a build ready that’s usable by a broader set of people, and we’re now ready to get that build out there. This build should be considered ‘pre-alpha,’ so there are some warnings and caveats.”
However, Vukićević cautioned that the Android FF team had only tested the mobile browser on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
“It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot,” he warned.
“Memory usage of this build isn’t great – in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.”
Vukićević also acknowledged that users would encounter an app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs.
“This is a quirk of our install process…we’re working to get rid of it. [And] you can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.”
Finally, Vukićević noted that the pre-alpha build required Android 2.0, along with an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device.
“This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card,” he added.
