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Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 Beta For Android, Maemo
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released the first beta of its Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo. The browser is based on the Firefox 4 core and should be released in the same time frame as the big brother. The mobile browser includes Firefox Sync, a cloud feature that enables users to sync browsing history, passwords, form-fill data and bookmarks, as well as open tabs." Android news site Androinica also mentions the release, and provides a small tutorial on installing beta apps for Android.
Sigh, I wish that meme would die a horrible death. Fennec is new and they haven't worked all the bugs out of it, but the whole firefox ZOMG memory leaks thing is really, really old.
I've tried the portable version and it does have issues, but I haven't seen any evidence of leaks yet. Although admittedly since I've been using daily builds, I haven't been using it very much.
Don't really care about browsers supported by giant corporations. It's Firefox forever for me
As to the whole notion that somehow the browser writer sees my bookmarks - I have big problems with that.
They should just jump to Firefox 8 to be on par with Microsoft IE and Google Chrome.
With Microsoft suing Motorola over "sync" features of their Android phone, I think it would be foolish for any phone maker to rush headlong with this browser suite.
The features are compelling, but it may be patent encumbered and may have the potential to embroil an OEM in litigation.
I hope it isn't patent encumbered, but I wonder if anyone has gone through the features with a fine toothed comb to determine the IP licensing requirements of manufacturers. That would actually be a pretty good resource to have.
That's one damn well-informed Anonymous Coward!
Get your news straight fella!
It uses 50MB RAM on boot, that's alot, but the app has worked pretty well for me so far. It's not bad, and the potential shines through. Sync works nicely, but there are some bugs with form data (saved data doesn't show up some times). Doesn't seem to like swype much, and forgets to bring up the software keyboard half the time. Page load times are a few seconds slower than stock android 2.2
Tested on my Samsung Galaxy S GT-i9000 running froyo XXJPK
Ugly font rendering and kinda jerky on my G2. Also uses a fuckload of ram and storage. I'm not impresses.
I just tried it and couldn't post here it was so aweful.
Font and/or font rendering was aweful (had to be much larger than either dolphin or default to be readable)
Double tap did not zoom enough (about 85 characters, I think it's keeping the pixel count true, but when I zoom I expect my characters to have at least one pixel between them, and many don't).
Slow, but I expected that as it's a beta.
The start page looks nice.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It just crashes on start... so much for being useful... I have Sprint's HTC Hero with Android 2.1.
Makes my over clocked 1ghz Droid1 come to a screeching halt. If i resize the webpage it just crashes out, after freezing up for a full 30 seconds... The UI (from what I saw of it before uninstalling) is impressive though. Each side is a swipe of the finger away and performs various functions. Very intuitive. Shows clear potential, but the size of the app and the CPU usage needs to come down hard and fast to be remotely usable....
I installed it on my Nexus One and tried posting this from there, but it's still way too unstable to do that (it didn't crash, but it kept scrolling/resizing in weird ways).
It's much improved over the Alpha, but one thing still bugs me.
Sync won't let you use your own server.
Firefox Sync is /the/ killer-app for me. It's really the only reason I'd want to use a different browser (barring EXTREME speed improvements), and they've neutered it to the point where it's, well, pointless. I've seen people request this feature ever since the pre-alpha days, to no avail.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
First big issue for me: the sync credentials page use some non-Android text box, so I can't copy my username/password from my password keeper and paste them in. I use large ugly generated passwords for stuff like that and I REALLY don't want to have to type them.
Waze does this crap too; why program *AROUND* the interface provided!? Seriously, your text boxes aren't precious snowflakes that are so special as to not use what the OS gives you (and supports).
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
Firefox on Android is a painful experience. The zooming is jerky. The fonts are ugly. It's not very responsive to clicks. Absolutely a horrible experience. That said, there are sites that just plain didn't work with the default browser that do work correctly with Firefox on Android, so I'll keep it around for that.
If you haven't had any sites fail with the default browser, skip this for now. If you have, try them with Firefox. You'll probably keep Firefox installed just for those sites.
Fox befriends Android, Android unable to feel emotions , Fox feels shunned and burns android's memory. The Droid police looking for "Fire" Fox...
You could probably run gimp in maemo, if that's what you're asking.
Really slow and jerky on my EVO. Google maps didn't work, so I immediately uninstalled.
The beta release requires a newer processor than the Hero. See the system requirements page for details, and an experimental (non-optimized) build for older and low-end phones.
linux used on various nokia devices, probably something else. deprecated for the horribly named but (i believe) similar meego, which is some sort of partnership with intel, if memory serves.
Sent from my PDP-11
Really every application leaks memory. I use Firefox and will continue to use Firefox regardless of it leaking on my desktop. Sure the portable version leaked early in Alpha stage a bit more than preferred from what I hear, but what I said was meant as a joke not an insult towards the device. My comment...
More ways to leak memory!
...also was completely ambiguous in relation to the four bullet points above I have no idea why people rated it as a troll, until I read your comment:
Sigh, I wish that meme would die a horrible death.
hedwards, I really am only halfway in tune with the latest memes it seems and I can see how my comment could have been annoying if everyone keeps on saying that memory leaks memory leaks (sorry Slashdot, oops)
There is a little red line that tells me when I am an idiot and cannot spell. I need a blue line or some different color to tell me where potential meme infringement may occur...
cheers
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
The install file for Maemo won't install on an N800 (evidently, only the newer N900 - that is one thing I don't like about Nokia; when the newer version comes out, kiss support for the older versions goodbye).
The Android file might "work" on Android 2.0 or later, but it doesn't work on a Pandigital Novel - it looks like it wasn't built for ARM5.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Using FF4B for a few months has been the most torturous experience I have had with a software in my last 20 years of life as a programmer/developer.
:( and then I launched FF3.6
I never thought Mozilla's standards could such that bad. Their beta 6 software is not even an Alpha quality software. Crashes, hang ups, GUI malfunctions etc. are all over the place.
Last night finally I exploded with anger and yelled myself: why are you doing this to yourself?!!!
If this low quality tradition continues, I will go with IE or even the spyware chrome.
Kind of ironic in a article about Firefox 4 beta coming to Maemo.
The N900 has a gig of ram after all. 50mb ram isnt so much even for (some) mobile devices.
Actually, it has 256 megs of RAM and 768 megs of swap on an internal flash device.
Enough said... Want a decent browser for Android that reminds you of Firefox? Use Dolphin Browser HD.
The only difference is the lack of Add-ons, the rest is pristine.
I downloaded this tonight for my droidx and my first impression is not good. In about and hour of use i had to force close twice, the phone was horribly slow while it was running, and pages looked terrible. Maybe the next release ill give it another go.
If it's an Android Firefox maybe they should have name it Muffet, assuming a firefox is like a daggit.
Technically yes, but thats 768 megs of accessible ram that most Android devices dont have.
It does actually work exceptionally well. I've had 16 browser windows and a few chat windows open at the same time and its incredibly smooth.
Dude, please don't sit there and pretend 768 MB of swap is anything like 768 MB of actual RAM. Seriously, just don't. Furthermore, a rooted Android device can be configured for as much swap space as your heart desires as well as compressed cache.
Don't complain when incomplete software isn't complete.
My PhD is on software engineering and I allow myself to comment and complain every software I see. I complain software standards and processes and degradation of those standards in Mozilla.
I don't see anything compelling enough to draw me away from Dolphin HD.
Holy crap, and to think, I almost bought one of those instead of my Desire. Why the hell only 256MB? I mean, swap is fine and all, but it's not like 512MB or even 768MB would've bumped up the price much... the device was already expensive.
Glad I went with a Desire...
Ah crap, ignore that comment please... my threshold.was too low and missed the post about the N900, making it look like you were talking about the Galaxy S... I was beginning to question my sanity.
You of all people should understand what beta software is. Maybe instead of complaining you should submit bug reports. Do something useful with your vast understanding of software development.
Or just run release builds. Whichever squelches your whining.
I'll stick with Opera Mobile. It's clearly head and shoulders above the competition, and the only place where it isn't(Flash support) there are other browsers(like Skyfire) to pick up that little bit of slack.
It's a really huge application in the Android world, though.
I hope the RCs and the finale releases will be slimmer.
And I hope it will get its way to the market.
And I hope Google will release Chrome for Android as well, a main missing app there.
Welcome the the mobile browser wars.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Ugly font rendering and kinda jerky on my G2. Also uses a fuckload of ram and storage. I'm not impresses.
I've just installed it on my HTC Wildfire, but cannot start it. It crashes after several seconds, without error message.
Phone Nerd II: Wrath of Maemo
You can install Firefox Sync on your own server (like I have), and then Mozilla won't even see your encrypted data.
http://tobyelliott.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/weave-minimal-server/
With the HTC Desire, when you enter the Sync Key the key is visible and what bothers me more, it get's stored in the keyboard dictionary as an unknown word. Why not handle it like a password as the desktop version does? And when visiting http://www.google.com/ I wasn't automatically redirected to http://www.google.com/m. I don't know if this works with other websites.
Just (re)installed what I thought was the Firefox-4 beta linked in TFA on my N900.
Error message "Fennec already installed".
Uninstalled the original Firefox for Maemo that I had, installed the linked version, and hussah!
Version information confirms the Maemo-Firefox is Fennec-3.6, not a beta of 4.0
So old news on the part of Maemo.
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
Crashes, hang-ups and GUI malfunctions? That was pretty much the main feature of Netscape 4.x, which was not only stable software, but also the dominant browser platform. And you never used it?
Not to say that you may not well have experienced severe issues, but I have been running nightly versions since well before 3.6 and issues only came up a handful of times even with all experimental features enabled and a ton of extensions installed. Have you used an old profile with the beta or did you create a new one? This could be one possible (and easy to solve) cause for breakage and instability.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Two reasons. First, the N900 uses the TI OMAP with the package-on-package configuration. The RAM connects directly to the top of the SoC, meaning that you don't need any motherboard traces or extra board real estate for the RAM chip. This helps keep the device small. I think you can get 512MB PoP modules now, but they are still very new.
The second reason is power consumption. It is very difficult to turn off part of the RAM, and because it's volatile it needs to be powered all of the time. Doubling the amount of RAM doubles the power that the RAM consumes. This impacts the battery life. Of course, swapping impacts it more (flash uses a lot of power for rewrites), but 256MB is quite a lot, so they are assuming it won't be swapping very often.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Boot time (initial start of FF when not returning to it, but used a task killer) is as slow as booting my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop 64bit system with 8Gb RAM - not good.
Firefox does render a page nicely, without much difference from the desktop version, but renders it in fullscreen (entire page on screen).
No setting for "mobile view".
No easy setting for default zoom level. When following a link, the next page is rendered at the same fullscreen zoom, so new zoom is needed.
Click an Ajax link that updates a
and the browser returns to the top of the page - not optimal, but it didn't reset the zoom...
There aren't any customizations that are easily available, not enven enough to compare with a small fast browser like DB mentioned above or SkyFire. The general look/feel of FF for Android is a very basic app that should still be in alpha as the customization menu is very odd and not polished compared with other smaller and similar programs.
Mozilla, please don't make Android apps that divert from the way Android apps are supposed to do, use the menues, and respect the backbutton when pressed... aka kill your current download/render of a page if the backbutton is pressed, don't continue working on something that the user want's to stop.
My device is HTC Desire with latest HTC Android 2.2, so it is not an old G1 I'm using, though FF4 beta for Android feels like it is running on a G1.
Click an Ajax link that updates a
and the browser returns to the top of the page - not optimal, but it didn't reset the zoom...
Should be:
Click an Ajax link that updates a <div> tag and the browser returns to the top of the page - not optimal, but it didn't reset the zoom...
It's actually a form of debian used on four linux devices, the n770, n800, n810 and the n900. The n900 being the only device that is a cell phone.
Maemo isn't "linux in a box", like Android is. It's pretty much desktop linux, with multiple desktops, true multitasking(!), and command line interface if you desire it. You can probably compile any app for linux to work on maemo.
It's a very small section (the uber geek) of cell phone OS population, but it's the leader in terms of innovation.
Meego is a partership between intel and nokia to build a mobile linux OS. Meego will replace maemo.
Joke about the name all you want, but Maemo and Meego will both make you carry around your laptop a lot less. It's the closest thing to a pocket computer available anywhere.
Really every application leaks memory.
Unless you and I have very different definitions of "leaks memory" this simply is not true.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Your right, smaller well formed applications and languages that include automatic garbage collection (eg Java) may completely avoid this issue. You are right in saying that it isn't every application but many applications do leak small amounts (tolerable) of memory, like Firefox on my computer. I should not have used a universal qualifier there...
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
When you first run Weave/Sync on a given machine, it asks you for a passphrase. It's going to be a problem if you don't remember it, since you'll need this passphrase to be able to read the data elsewhere.
Actually Maemo 5 is set for maximum swappiness from the factory, and 256 isn't really a lot - mine has no apps running now (apart from desktop widgets and other background stuff) and it only has 99MB free, and about 87MB of swap space is in use (out of the nearly 1500MB I have with a swap partition on the microSD). Having enough RAM to make use of the swap file unnecessary would have been really nice, if you close a big app it really bogs down while it de-pages stuff.
But hey, it's either this or a phone with a rooted Android install, and Maemo's much more modder/developer friendly and free of carrier influence.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You sure can! That's how I made this:
http://sites.google.com/site/gameboyrmh/cryingbeaver.jpg
(inspired by the somethingawful forums emoticon)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My moment is running 2.1 Android and the app kept crashing. I uninstalled it.
I have nothing clever to put here...
Back when I was about 13 or 14, I used to tell people that the Mac I had then had 40 MB of RAM. They were always very impressed. In reality, only 16 MB of that was real RAM. Hey, it's all accessible RAM, right? It's all good at that age when you're trying to show that your dick is the biggest.
I have a 1 TB and a 500 GB in my machine. I should tell people that I have 1.5 TB of RAM. In fact, I'm going to start telling people that at the pub tonight... maybe I'll get lucky.
I installed Firefox Sync twice recently. The first time it asked for a password and also a "secret passsphrase". A week later, the second time I created a new account for a different set of computers, it generated a twenty-letter key (like "xaedr-gterw-sfdfs-hryns" or something). I guess there was a change in between. If they did not generate a key for you, then the sync key is your passphrase. Apparently it's used to actually encrypt your data (as opposed to the password, which seems to be just for authentication).
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I love Firefox and Android, but unfortunately FF for Android is still huge and slow. I hope this improves over time, and it probably will, but I thought that maybe since the nightly builds they might have made some kind of breakthrough that warranted Beta status. Not so.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
The problem is that it is swapping constantly and usually has much more swap than actual RAM in use, and probably why many N900 owners find the device to be sluggish after a couple days of uptime, but fast after a reboot.