Mozilla Corporation released late on Thursday, the pre-alpha version of Mozilla Firefox’s mobile cousin, which is codenamed Fennec, after the African desert fox. The device, which is a preview release meant for “testing purposes only” will be released for the Nokia N800 and N810, as well as for desktop computers (under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).

The reason for releasing this preview version for desktop computers as well is that the entire community can pitch in with bug discovery and feedback. According to Mozilla’s platform ‘evangelist’ Mark Finkle, "you can install Fennec on your Windows, OS X or Linux desktop too! We want you to be able to experiment, provide feedback, write add-ons and generally get involved with the Mozilla Mobile project, even if you don't have a device."

The ‘device’ version that is out so far, targets Nokia’s N800 and N810 series Internet Tablets. They are not so much mobile phones as Internet browsing devices, which use both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to connect to other computers and mobile phones. It runs the Maemo as an operating system, which is a Debian-based mobile distro of Linux.

There’s also a version of Fennec being developed for the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system, but it will be a while before that one is released for public tests.

Fennec has touch-screen support, a pop-up blocker, a password manager, and some functions which duplicate those of its larger cousin, Firefox 3, namely the unified search/bookmark/URL Awesome Bar and tabbed-style web browsing.

Not yet implemented, but coming up for the Alpha Release, are Mozilla’s TraceMonkey Java engine, and geolocation support. The latter is already present in the Gecko 1.9.1 code base which has been embedded in Firefox 3.1 Beta.

It shall remain to be seen if the open-source Fennec does better than Mozilla’s last attempt at mobile browsing, the Minimo, which was abandoned last November. Fennec’s Alpha 1 release can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site, here.