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Mozilla is making progress on the Fennec Browser for Windows Mobile. This alpha release features improved start times and panning support, as well as greater support for different screen resolutions. Since this is still an alpha release, try at your own risk and a backup of your data is definitely called for. One thing to note is that Fennec is aimed at devices with at least 128MB RAM, so don't install it if you have less than that.

"Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the release of two milestones for the Fennec project - Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. Additionally, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux."

Anyone brave enough to try this? The improvements from the first alpha include a revamped UI, fixing usability issues and improving performance (more details in this blog post). What with the tremendous strides other mobile browsers have made in the past year or two, Fennec better be something really special, or it's going to be a non-starter when it finally releases.

"We are pleased to announce that Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile 6 is available for download by developers and testers. This is an early developer release intended for testing purposes only. We would like to invite interested Windows Mobile developers and users to join with Mozilla's developer and user community to help develop, test and refine the product."

Right now it's just for touch-enabled devices, but Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser has just hit alpha and is available for download. Just be aware that alpha means it's still unfinished and likely full of bugs, but it seems the feature set has been frozen and it's just performance and bug quashing from here on. If you're brave enough to have a go, remember to drop us a line and tell us how well it works...or doesn't as the case may be. Just remember to back up your data first!

"It's looking more and more like Mozilla is ready to really do this: Late last night, the organization posted the first public beta of the browser that could end up being "Firefox Mobile." It still goes by the code name Fennec, and the first beta is testing whether touchscreen mobile users will be willing to have literally all their browser functions be placed off-screen, if it makes room for more elements of the Web page."

What I find interesting - and impressive - is that Fennec is going to have TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine that will come with Firefox 3.5. Usually mobile components tend to be stripped down, pale shadows of their desktop counters - it's nice to see the Mozilla developers putting performance at the forefront. Right now the beta is only for desktop Windows, which surprises me a little bit - you'd think that the beta stage was when they'd be ready to do the on device testing after the desktop testing in the Alpha stage. Still, I'm thrilled to see Fennec starting to gain some momentum - with the continued fumbling by Microsoft in getting a great mobile browser into the hands of its customers, it's nice to see another option coming for us to use.

It was recently announced that Firefox Mobile ("Fennec") was going to be a reality, and it appears that development is now steadily progressing. :) Brad Lassey has a bunch of screenshots up at his blog, including some basic pages as well as Acid3 run to demonstrate he has the full browser running!

Exciting stuff, especially as Firefox Mobile is likely to support kinetic, touch-based scrolling as per this concept video. As far as I can tell, these are just development snapshots, and no public binaries are actually available for download... yet.