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Mozilla’s Firefox is the only browser I use at home. Stable, tabbed browsing enabled, and rich with add-on options, so I was expecting similar functionality and stability from Fennec on my WinMo 6.1 handset. After the initial install from a 9.09 MB file, the browser took a minute or two longer to load the first time, but then the Fennec start page loaded fast enough. This is the largest installation file yet, compared to SkyFire 1.0 at 679 KB and Opera Mobile 9.7 at 4.65 MB, and I bet it needs an equal amount of elbow room to run.

The browsing interface didn’t look too flattering on my AT&T Tilt’s 2.3-inch by 4.4-inch screen. The auto-hiding address bar displayed in about one-third of the screen, which didn’t leave a lot of browsing area. Thankfully, once I made it to my Hotmail account the address bar hid just as soon as I started to point-and-draft along the page.

Fennec handles tabbed browsing in an interesting way via thumbnails listed on the far left-hand side of the screen, but I these tabs opened themselves automatically with every new link I clicked on during browsing. I couldn’t find the settings button to actually explore my options, but I’m hoping the auto-opening tabs can be disabled. There’s probably no easier way to eat up memory on a handset faster than having separate tabs open in the background like in Opera Mobile 9.7.

The right-hand side is reserved for the forward, back, and bookmarking buttons, although I wasn’t able to find the settings menu. Swiping to hide or show either panel on the left or right side was a little awkward, especially while swiping around a webpage.

Actual web browsing went smoothly from Hotmail to Gmail to YouTube, all loaded within seconds through AT&T HSPDA speeds. Gmail and YouTube both loaded in mobile view, but that’s something that could easily be changed at the bottom of the main page of each site. The tricky part was entering log-in information on any site; double-tapping on my screen would either bring me too close to text fields or not close enough. This also hindered searching of any Fennec add-ons.

This is a respectable Alpha release of Fennec, although I’m looking forward to future improvements. The ability to disable or limit tabbed browsing, resizing navigation bars, and more exact control of zooming in and out would be ideal. For now, I think I’ll stick with SkyFire until Fennec’s next evolution.

Try the Mozilla’s Fennec Alpha 1 release here.