First screenshot of Firefox Mobile (Fennec):

Source

Mercurynews published today an article with Mozilla CEO John Lilly. It includes some interesting news about a new Mozilla mobile browser:

“Q: And what are you doing in mobile?

Only a few weeks until we all have a little more fun…

In 2006 Microsoft launched the Deepfish – Mobile browsing lab research. The goal of this project was to come up with the best user interface for mobile web browsing.

However…the Iphone with Safari is out, Nokia launched Xpressmusic and the Gphone with a possible Chrome browser is around the corner.

Long story short: Microsoft stopped the project and is happy that “Deepfish helped drive that innovation”. Well…sad to see this fish going belly up. Congrats to MS for all their achievements.

Would be nice to know if there will be a new Mobile IE coming out?

Mitchel Baker, chairperson of Mozilla, announced that by 2010 there should be an effective
Firefox in the the mobile market. Here the quotation from the Mozilla dev blog:

“Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukicevic has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture
which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and
handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full
web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant
user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work
will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by
allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that
do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s
TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha
release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.”

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Techcraver posts today about the new Google Chrome browser and its possible impact on the Mobile Web.
He points out that the Browser will probably be rolled out as a Mobile browser after it will be made available to Windows, Mac and Linux.
Also Om Malik over at Gigaom see Chrome as a browser that “can carve out a nice chunk of the (mobile) browser market.
Phandroid even goes that far to say that “Chrome…could become the preferred mobile web browser and bridge the ever narrowing gap between the desktop and mobile experience”.

I am convinced that Google has a bigger strategy for Chrome and since they failed to transcode websites on the fly (like everybody else), this might be the way to go and open up a fast mobile web to Android other platforms.

For me the past two weeks have been clearly the “Google Weeks”. Their recent Admanager and now Chrome launches just have an impact beyond believe.

Opera Software
today announced that Opera Mini is going to Africa. Opera Software has
partnered with MTN, the leading telecommunications company in Uganda,
to bring the mobile Web to the company’s nearly three million
subscribers. By expanding into Africa, Opera is strengthening its
strategy to make the Web available to more people, on any device, from
anywhere in the world.

Well….Africa will be Mobile Web Land. That’s already in the books.

Never heard of it, but will test Teashark – a brand new mobile web browser.
Features include:
Intuitiv navigation
2-level zoom
Landscape view
Multiple tabs and history
Bookmark management with color tagging
Enhancd click and search

Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta has been released today. Here the new key features:

• Faster

  Speed tests show Opera Mobile 9.5 beta loads Web pages 2.5 times faster than Internet Explorer Mobile.

• Pan and zoom

  Opera
  Mobile 9.5 defaults to full Web page viewing and allows users to pan
  and zoom into their desired content in just a few clicks.

• Improved user interface

  Opera
  has completely renovated its user interface. Cleaner and more
  intuitive, the new UI is designed for quick and easy navigation.

• Opera Dragonfly

  It’s a developer’s toolkit right on the mobile phone.

• Improved standards support

  Opera
  Mobile 9.5 is the most standards compliant browser available. Opera
  Software remains steadfast in its commitment to make the Web accessible
  for all.

• Save pages and/or images

  With a click, simply save your selected content and view it later offline.

• A true Web experience

  Multitask with tabbed browsing, view content in widescreen, and enjoy small-screen rendering.

• Rich Web content

  Browse with the full richness of AJAX.

• Type less and browse more

  Save time with address auto-complete, Password Manager and pop-up handler.

• History and bookmarks

  Pick up past browsing sessions and bookmark them for next time.

• Upload contents

  Upload to Web sites such as online mail services or blogs.