via boingboing.net
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via wired.com -
Firefox has been a big contender in the desktop browser game for a while now, but Mozilla has taken its time coming to the mobile arena. With a stripped-down Chrome running standard in most Android devices, it has been hard work outdoing the speed and simplicity the default browser has to offer. Steel was an early contender, but was soon purchased by Skyfire and has yet to be released again. Dolphin browser came along and offered tabbed browsing, multi-touch and some interesting social-network integration. xScope is a newer contender with added file-management, task-killing capabilities, and a couple of neat tricks under the hood.
Mozilla hopes to change the game with Fennec, their mobile browser. A public "pre-alpha" release came out today, which you can download here. It's still a little slow and buggy, and there are somespecial considerations as developer Vladimir Vukićević points out:This build should be considered “pre-alpha”, so there are some warnings and caveats:
- We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
- It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
- Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
- You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
- You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
- This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device
Check out Vladimir's blog for more information, or continue below for my review. -
It seems that the Chinese government has been attacking the digital accounts of numerous human-rights leaders, and other political dissidents, through Google and many other online services. After the internet search giant found out about the attacks, they posted a public response outlining the attacks and the possibility of shutting down services in China.
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.Hopefully this will have an enormous impact on the Western view of Chinese politics and human-rights in the upcoming year. Google has the visibility, and the weight, to push people's eyes in a certain direction.
via BoingBoing
