Exciting news from the mobile front yesterday, as developer Vladimir Vukićević announced that a more usable “pre-alpha” build of Firefox for Android (aka Fennec) is now available to a “broader set of people.” As you would expect from a project in such an early stage, there a number of bugs and other issues that still need to be resolved. Vladimir acknowledges as much in the post, offering a number of specific examples. Here are few of them (verbatim):

• 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.

For more on this development – including how you can install and test the build yourself – go read the entire post.

Happy mobile testing!