IT News
about:mobile - Fennec M6, Windows Mobile and more…In this issue…
Fennec M6 Available
We’ve made the sixth milestone release of Fennec. Fennec M6 includes a
couple of major features. It has initial support for a tab-like interface,
support for mailto: and tel: urls and some stability fixes vs. M5. If you
click on a mailto: url it will open the mailer on the N810 and if you click
on a tel: url it will try to make a call using a SIP client on the tablet.
You can find more information in the release notes. Mark Finkle also
has a post on this release and has a screenshot of the new tab-like interface.
Windows Mobile Status
Brad Lassey has posted a progress report on adding support for Windows
Mobile. Windows Mobile is very popular in the United States and is one of
the platforms we are targeting for support in Fennec. He covers many of the
details around what changes we’re making to migrate to Windows
Mobile-specific APIs vs. our current Windows code. If you’re interested in
the deep details you should check out his post.
New Mobile Network Analysis
Pat McManus has updated his http optimizations with new data from July.
During the last month he spent a lot of time tuning our current http stack
and has managed to improve our performance on some mobile networks by as
much as 58%. He also identified some areas around pipelining and request
ordering that will probably result in some significant improvements as
well. His update contains a lot of background on the data and is worth
reading. His current optimizations have already landed in the Fennec source
code and will be included in our Fennec M7 build. For more information,
follow the bug.
Geolocation in Fennec
At the recent Mozilla 2008 Summit, Doug Turner demonstrated some of the new
geolocation capabilities that are starting to land as part of the Firefox
3.1 development effort and are making their way into our mobile builds as
well. The main feature is a navigator.geolocation object that web developers
can use from JavaScript to query for information on location. This
information is made available only if the user allows it to be shared with a
specific web site. Doug has a complete overview in his weblog including
screenshots, a sample page and other technical information.
Filed under Mozilla