Mozilla developers are hard at work getting a running version of Firefox/Fennec onto your Android OS device. As of right now, they have the basic structure built and running in Android, and they have been able to successfully load their first page. It’s a long way from here to there, including a few stops at alpha and beta, but the progression is very good. It lacks a nice mobile interface at this point, as the screen shot shows. It’s got a full up desktop window working right now, the keyboard doesn’t work at all, and some of the other functionality is missing, but it is running. For more details…
Vladimir Vukićević, one of the Mozilla developers working on the Android port, and the author behind the blog post with the nice screen shot explained the reasoning behind the awkward desktop window on Android:
You’ll note that this is the full Firefox interface, and not the Fennec/Firefox Mobile UI; we’re testing with the full interface because it’s significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well. Given the interest in Android on netbook and tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these. Android has been pretty great to work with so far; it’s a bit unusual platform for us due to its Java core, but with the NDK we’re able to bridge things together without many problems.
Android running it's own Firefox/Fennec Browser
This early screen shot can be yours too, just head over to the Android port wiki page at Mozilla and download the source, compile it and go. Results may vary. In Vladimir’s posting one of the most encouraging quotes comes from the first line, “…porting Firefox/Fennec to Android is progressing at a good clip.” So, what, tomorrow?
One reason the Firefox/Fennec project will take longer than your average Android application is that Mozilla is building the browser from scratch using the Android NDK, which enables a more integrated application, and should make for a better performing browser being able to take advantage of direct linkage without having to go through a middle man for some api aspects.
Vlad1 Blog via Android Central via Gizmodo
