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Firefox Arrives On Android
Barence writes "Mozilla has launched a 'pre-alpha' version of Firefox for Android smartphones. The mobile version of Firefox, codenamed Fennec, has until now been restricted to Maemo Linux handsets. But following a surge in developer effort, Mozilla has unveiled a build for handsets running Android 2.0 or above. Mozilla is making no guarantees about the browser's stability. 'It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot,' writes Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic on his blog. 'Memory usage of this build isn't great — in many ways it's a debug build, and we haven't really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.'"
Unless you want to help debug and/or develop, I doubt anyone expects or even wants you to.
But I made the fatal mistake of putting it into landscape to get a better keyboard, and it brought my phone (Desire) to a crawl. I assume it was trying to rebuild the page layout, something bad happened and displayed a black page.
It Shows promise, it is not usable (obviously) but the UI design seems better than the inbuilt browser. With tabs off screen to the left, and navigation buttons off screen to the right.
Would of been nice to see pinch zoom working, and I am assume that it will (or a custom build that will).
From what I have seen, when it heads into a more stable phase, I would probably swap right away.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
I can smell the momentum in the air with Android. I was one of the first people (suckers/early adopters) to buy a G1 handset from T-Mobile. At the time I had a 2G iPhone. Used the G1 for a week, went back to my unlocked, jailbroken iPhone because it had a bunch of great apps that worked well, better form factor, better touchscreen, and much more usable.
Fast forward 16 months, during which time the G1 has sat there and gathered dust. I've finally gotten fed up with my 3G iPhone, the closed ecosystem, the limited email application which is the dealbreaker for me (lack of IMAP IDLE still - msgpush.com is not an option for me, and switching email services to support the technologies Steve Jobs approves of is ridiculous). The other day I decided to blow the dust off my G1, update to the latest software (which on a G1 means running CyanogenMod since the official updates are still stuck at Android 1.6 for G1s, and CyanogenMod is a 1.6/2.0 hybrid - and despite rumors to the contrary, CyanogenMod is rock-solid stable on the G1) and see how much things have improved over the last 18 months.
The openness of the Android platform is what really is blowing me away. Running CyanogenMod, installing themes, downloading up-to-the-minute app releases and bug fixes from open source projects and vendors without having to go through Market is absolutely liberating after 2 and change years of iPhone usage, and having to clamor for every feature addition and update. On Android, if you want a new feature, you can usually find it or you can add it yourself - K9mail is the best living example of this itch-scratching driving innovation.
Anyway, more specifically on the topic - I don't know if Fennec/Mobile Firefox will be a winner or not in the short run. Most likely it will take a while to get there - remember how long Mozilla took to get to a usable desktop browser? But ultimately, more browser competition on Android will be a very good thing, and AdBlock would be sweet. The fact that we have these choices on Android drives innovation and competition, and is the reason that the platform is currently improving faster than the iPhone platform. And makes it a much more fun place to be as a geek than iPhone-land right now.
I see you're one of those people who knows a few testing buzzwords, and thus consider yourself an expert in the field.
Just so you know, "UAT" refers to user-acceptance testing, not "usability testing" like you've mistakenly claimed. Usability testing checks whether or not the program is convenient to use, whether or not it's accessible to people with handicaps, whether or not it works well with various input and output devices, and so forth.
User-acceptance testing ("UAT") refers to testing that the client or user performs in order to ensure that the system meets their minimum requirements in terms of functionality, usability, stability, reliability, performance, and so on.
Oh, and your breakdown of the tests applied to each release level are pure bunk. They don't even correspond to Firefox's development practices at all. Please refrain from spewing mountains of bullshit the next time you post. Thank you!