When you get brand new N900 you already have MicroB, Maemo-tailored Mozilla-based default web browser, which would be good for most of us. But you still have a choice what to use and I’d like to show you possibilities.

First of all let’s see what happened to Fennec (named after small, desert fox) a.k.a. Firefox Mobile for last few months, since it was release candidate. It has it’s engine in common with MicroB, so I was expecting something really nice and fast. After starting Fennec (named Firefox in the menu, even though process name is fennec) for first time I had to wait quite a bit, I thought that first start may do some initializations and this may take such long time. But in comparison to MicroB it’s working slower, at least in my opinion nothing interesting happened in performance area since release candidate some time ago.

First impression is quite good, address bar is on top and hides when scrolling down opened page, when you scroll to the left or right out of the screen then you will see additional spaces for tabs with miniature of webpage (on the left) and toolbar with back and forward, bookmarking and settings buttons.

When going to the settings I feel more comfortable than in MicroB, it’s more readable I think. I have the impression that Fennec was prepared to have better support for addons, since this part of browser seems to be more functional than in it’s Maemo brother, some people may really enjoy this feature.

Firefox Mobile is nice alternative if it comes to functionality, nevertheless in my opinion is too slow to be replacement for MicroB in everyday use. At least I won’t change to it untill it will work faster.

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