Saturday, August 28, 2010

Fennec (Mozilla Firefox) for Android, or how to run out of storage on your device.

The first Alpha version of Fennec (a.k.a Firefox Mobile) has been released yesterday. The advantage which Mozilla wants to use against other browsers is the possibility of adding add-ons in the browser, in order to increase its functionality. Mozilla says that their new mobile browser tries to bring the desktop experience (which is not something extraordinary, however), on the mobile devices.

Everything looks good, at least in theory. In practice, the program itself takes around 30 MB just to install, and this is way too much for some Android devices (eg. Nexus One, which has only <200 MB internal storage). I've successfully installed it and I remained with only around 100 KB free storage on the internal memory. But there's a problem. When I launch it, the screen stays blank and then it returns to launcher. The application has the possibility to move to SD card, and I've done that, but the situation remains the same (the application doesn't launch).

You can read more about Fennec and download it from the official Mozilla blog, here. If you want to install it, make sure you have at least 30 MB of free internal storage, otherwise the device will warn you that you're completely running out of internal storage.

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