With the arrival of the $800 million Glo 1 undersea cable to Lagos, a new stage has been set for mobile internet usage on the continent, it seems. While the accolades continue to mount, one problem persistently lurks in the background.

Good browsers on the small screen are difficult to find. The reasons are plethora, but interaction design experts have singled out the poor user experience, associated with mobile devices for internet use as the main bone of contention.

The major difficulty to reproducing the same experience that users find on the desktops/laptops on the mobile platform is the specific programmability required for such devices because of their technological architecture and size. 

The screen is so small. This has been a major issue to solve, some company have decided to solve it in the most logical way, phew!, to increase the screen size by projecting the display onto a larger surface, that too has its problems.

For many practical people, the safari browser on the iphone was the first real mobile browsing experience and the other players in the browser business couldn’t help following suit.

In November 2008, Mozilla launched an "alpha" version of a scaled-down, sped-up version of Firefox, called Fennec.  Fennec became consumer ready at the beginning of January 2009 and so far the reports suggest that a worthy competitor had just entered the field.

Major improvements in processing of javascript, the power behind responsive applications (ajax), and flash effects, also incorporated is the Firefox famous Awesome Bar- the intuitive address bar that guesses which page a user wants as they type a letter or two, based on frequently visited pages and their bookmarks.

In the screen size arena, Fennec spots a rather innovative approach to make maximum use of the screen area. By removing all user interface controls such Tool bars, address bar and bookmarks, until you need them.  By using a touch-screen interface design, as a user drags a finger to the right the open tabs are revealed, a drag to the left removes the tabs and shows the controls such as the back button and the address bar. Double-clicking a page element zooms in on it.

With its innovative features fennec may have just initiated another version of the browser wars, but this time the battle field is the mobile platform.