Alternative mobile browsers tested: Skyfire vs Opera Mobile vs Fennec vs Safari vs Internet Explorer vs BlackBerry

OS: Windows Mobile (alpha) or Maemo (beta)
Version tested: 1.0a3 on WinMo
JavaScript benchmark: 11,391.2ms
Acid3 result: 93/100
Get it from: bit.ly/wma3cab for WinMo or bit.ly/FFY3m for Maemo (direct downloads)

We don't have a Nokia N900 Maemo phone in the house, unfortunately, so we had to test the alpha version of Mozilla's mobile browser -- soon to be Firefox Mobile -- on Windows Mobile instead. But even in this early state, this browser from the people who brought you Firefox shows bucket-loads of potential.

We loved Fennec's innovative user interface, with a menu that slides in along one side of the screen and a list of thumbnails of open pages along the other side. This works gorgeously when we browsed in landscape mode. Overall, Fennec's user interface was the slickest of the contenders, although it wasn't the most intuitive.

Fennec was insanely fast at loading complicated pages -- the fastest of the browsers we tested. But there's no Flash support yet, and we had no trouble crashing this prototype version. Nevertheless, it may be worth a few crashes to take advantage of Fennec's slick user interface, speed and support for loading multiple simultaneous pages.