Firefox 4 mobile beta arrives

Mozilla this evening posted the first beta of Firefox 4 mobile for Android and Maemo devices. Known as Fennec before the change, the new version introduces a Layers concept that should be much faster for animation, scrolling and zooms through the interface. It now recognizes multi-touch zooming on any device that supports the feature itself and carries Firefox Sync of bookmarks, forms, history and tabs from the desktop.

The browser itself continues to be a largely one-for-one port of the Gecko engine that runs Firefox on the desktop. Accordingly, it can render modern CSS and JavaScript as well as render many of the components of HTML5 that the original software can manage.

Mozilla hasn't said if or when a beta will be ready for Windows Mobile despite the presence of an alpha, but it won't develop a Windows Phone 7 version due to OS limits. BlackBerry has been ruled out for similar reasons, and Apple's non-compete iOS rules have led Mozilla to stick to Firefox Home and use WebKit for site visits in the sync app.

By Electronista Staff