Mobile Firefox "Fennec" Beta Goes Live

The moment an awful lot of you have been waiting for: Mozilla’s mobile browser, Fennec has hit beta.

Before you get too excited (like I did, sadface), the beta is currently only running on the Nokia N810 tablet but users/developers can download it to their computers. That aside, it looks really impressive so far, even if it is (by the looks of things) very touchy feely.

Fennec endeavours to get rid of the need for typing as much typing as possible. While it’s obviously not possible to get rid of all of it, handy features like the awesome bar make browing quite easy. Another feature we really like the look of is the shortcut bar along the bottom. Showing links to Yahoo! Google! Ask.com and Wikipedia, users can use the Fennec search bar at the top and hit the icon on the bar running along the bottom of the screen to just send the text through that search engine. Pretty nifty! It also remembers your passwords, which is again, less work.

Right now the beta is in that first-beta-ONLY-for-developers stage so we wouldn’t recommend downloading it if you’re not clued in about the different kinds of bugs and problems you risk running into along the way with early betas.

What about you guys? Have you (like me) been waiting ages for this mobile browser? I’ve been using Opera Mobile for mobile browsing and while it does the trick, it’s no where near what I’m used to with Firefox. While I’m well aware that mobile browsing is never going to match desktop browsing, my opinion is, the closer the better. Opera, since the start, has my Google Search in Swedish. No matter how many times I set and reset my bookmarks, my Google search is always stuck on Swedish. Check out the Fennec walkthrough here and download it here if you have a Nokia N810.