Mobile/Fennec/Releases/M8

Fennec M8 Notes

M8 has new browser UI additions and many bug fixes & improvements, including:

• Fennec is (mostly) sporting a new theme.
• Initial UI support panel has landed. Tap "gear" button in the sidebar to slide the UI panel into view. The UI panel contains separate panels for Add-on Manager, Download Manager and Preferences. The current UX design is not final. We need to integrate the new UI theme into the UI panel.
• The sidebars now slide into view as the user pans the content. The application menu button (F4) no longer forces the UI into view.
• Support for kinetic scrolling has been enhanced and is more responsive.
• The installer uses the Fennec icon and should prompt for the install menu location. It defaults to "Extras".
• A lot of work on rendering performance landed in M8. This includes front-end and back-end platform work.
• Support for a Firefox-like security error UI and pages, instead of error alert dialogs.
• A variety of UI and stability fixes thanks in large part to Mozilla QA.
• Support for out-of-memory notifications.

Several features just missed M8 and will be landing very soon:

• Ability to close tabs
• Opening new browser windows as tabs (like in Firefox)
• Initial Preferences support

There continues to be a lot of work on the underlying features and performance of XULRunner on Maemo. In addition, XULRunner on Windows Mobile has seen some serious updates and is very close to building directly from the main Mozilla trunk.

Note: M8 disables all plugins, including Flash. We found serious stability and performance issues with plugins. We intend to re-enable plugins as soon as possible.

Note: M8 supports the Maemo chinook & diablo distributions.

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