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The war to dominate the mobile browser experience will be a key feature of the 2009 market, and open source organization Mozilla is showing its hand early. Even before 2008 was over, the company released the second alpha version of the mobile version of Firefox, called Fennec, which itself is a reworking of an earlier project, Minimo.

The first alpha release - despite the high excitement of Firefox fans and everyone keen to see a really credible open source browser on the phone - was dogged by installation problems, and the second release of Fennec can so far only be downloaded to the Nokia N810 Linux-based tablet. Otherwise it is available for download to Mac, Linux or Windows desktops for testing purposes, but should soon be available for a wide range of handsets as it moves towards full release, hopefully in mid-year.

According to reviewers, the second alpha has significant improvements such as faster panning and zooming, improved responsiveness while pages are loading, and various new ease of use enhancements such as bookmarks. Most importantly, there will be the value of having the full Firefox stack in a mobile environment, and this is already stimulating developers to create innovative add-ons such as a Twitterbar extension, and a port of Mozilla's Weave framework. Like iPhone Safari, Fennec could bring a full desktop experience to the handset at last, with strong support for a wide range of developers and also for users being able to customize their own experience regardless of vendor or operator.

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