It's been a while since we heard from Mozilla's plans to port Firefox Mobile aka Fennec to Google's Android platform but it looks like the project makes some progress now. Vladimir Vukićević reports on his blog that he just got the first web page loaded on Android. While not too much is working yet (or working proper), the current development version is also not running on a real Android smartphone but in an emulator (for ease of debugging). Nevertheless, Vukićević  notices that "it's working just fine on physical hardware as well". Quite interesting is the interface, used for the Android development, because it's the full Firefox interface and not the expected Firefox Mobile/Fennec interface!

According to Vukićević, the project team is "testing with the full interface because it's significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well". And the reason for testing the Firefox interface instead of the Fennec interface is quite interesting too: "Given the interest in Android on Netbook and Tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these".

There is no Alpha release available yet but the development team has no doubts it will become available sooner than later. Which leads us to the question what happened with the Windows Mobile version of Fennec?

Cheers ~ Arne