First pre-release Firefox set for Android

Just weeks after Linux lost the support of Songbird, a music application, a new Linux browser has debuted.

It's a version of Firefox Fennec for the Android phone.

It's a "pre-alpha" release, announced by Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic on his personal blog. He gave a link from which you can download the current build.

It's not for grandma, or for casual walking around, he writes. Some of the limitations:

• Bugs might require you to reboot the phone.
• It's a memory hog.
• There's still an app exit and relaunch on the install.
• It does not support links from other apps.
• You will need Android 2.0 or above, and the phone needs to be OpenGL ES 2.0 capable.
• You have to install it on the phone's internal memory, not the SD card.

Most of this stuff will be fixed as the developers go along. Vukicevic calls it "a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha)." Don't say you weren't warned.

But still. Wa-ha-ha-ha. Candid software. Nudge, nudge. If you're a man of the world, squire, you might like to give it a tumble. One of the best contributions you can make to open source, as a non-programmer, is to try out new code.