Announcing Fennec 1.0 Beta 1

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Fennec 1.0 beta 1 on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:37 pm PT. We’ve excerpted from Stuart Parmenter’s blog about the milestone below. You can read the full blog post here or find out more by reading the release notes.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta.

On the feature front, we’ve enabled plugins so you can now watch videos on your favorite sites, and we’ve got in our first pass at improved bookmark management and support for bookmark folders. A lot of time was spent on infrastructure that we could use to build the rest of our app with. You’re now able to scroll things like preferences and the new bookmarks list. One of our main focuses for the next milestone will be on polishing the user interface — areas like the extension manager will get a face lift and we’ll start working more on some of the usability issues people have reported.