N900 Videos

The San Francisco folks had an N900 meetup in a noisy bar, and some of the Mozilla Fennec guys were there demonstrating Fennec on the N900. It runs pretty well, much faster than the earlier betas that we saw on the N810 earlier this year.

The Mozilla guys were showing the unreleased Beta 5, and tnkgrl filmed it for her blog. Filming conditions weren’t ideal, and the N900’s screen is often unreadable. But to make up for that, the walkthrough is highly informative and the reasoning behind the design of Fennec is well-explained.

The design of the user interface is largely driven by two factors: the limited screen space, and the difficulty of typing on a small device. This leads to the following design decisions:

• Website suggestions are presented as soon as you start typing, based on your frequent and recent visits
• Your desktop browser’s bookmarks and history are available (synchronised by Mozilla Weave)
• Direct, easy access is provided to search engines and key sites such as Wikipedia
• When you start to scroll a page, the top-of-page fields disappear, thereby automatically going full-screen
• Controls such as history and tabs are just “off the left of the page”, while back/forward and bookmarking are just “off the right of the page”
• Controls for preferences, downloads and add-ons are completely outside the context of a regular browsing page
• Add-ons are easily installed and can optimise the interface for the personal needs of the user

The great news is that the release version of Mobile Firefox (Fennec) will probably be available before the end of 2009.