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Firefox 4 Beta For Mobile Now Faster and Sleeker
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Beta 2 of Firefox 4 for Mobile. Some notable improvements over the initial beta release include 'reduced memory usage, improved text rendering and a 60% install size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB).' Mozilla also makes mention that 'actions like panning and zooming are faster and smoother, and page load times are reduced from our previous beta. On Android 2.2, we're now around 25% faster on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark than the stock browser.' A future beta release will enable GL acceleration, which should further improve the performance of the browser."
Unfortunately there's no mention of Flash support.
That's a significant change in size. Usually when such a drastic change occurs, it means they originally included many things that weren't necessary. That leads me to believe they really didn't care about this before.
No mention of whether it will do automatic horizontal fit of the text as in the stock Android browser. This is the single key feature that made me go back to the stock browser.
What an appropriate sig.
How does this compare to Opera Mobile (not Mini)? I run Windows Mobile 6.5 (shed a tear for me) and use Opera Mobile, and am curious how much better a browsing experience I would have with Android + Firefox 4.
Better known as 318230.
This device does not meet the minimum system requirements for Firefox.
Promising indeed!
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I just call all of them 'synecdoche'.
That doesn't sound unreasonable for a full-featured GUI browser. It's on par with Opera Mobile, which apparently will take up 20MB installed on Android.
Opera Mobile 10 for Symbian takes 8MB installed, but it lacks some features compared to the latest browsers.
You get browsers like QtWeb, that come with a fair amount of features in 7MB, but there are tradeoffs in disk size vs. features, run-time performance, memory usage, ease of upgrade, etc.
Why this has been modded as a flamebait!? Is criticizing Firefox forbidden here?
For the comparison, installation package for Opera Mobile 10 takes 5MB http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/versions/
17MB is extremely bloated for a mobile browser. The whole desktop package for the newest Opera takes just 10MB.
I don't recommend it yet. Tried to go to Slashdot right after installation: it loaded about halfway, hung for 30 seconds (not even the buttons below the screen responded), then crashed back to the homescreen. A few issues to work out, methinks.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
What's the difference between Minimo and FF mobile?
on many android devices the space for apps is limited. even 17mb is significant. considering the built-in browser works just fine, it's hard to justify using 17mb of space for a slightly different browser.
I have a 16 GB SD card in my phone, why do I care about a measly 17MB?
Why the heck does FF need the GPS location? *sigh* I really wish Android had a way to turn features off, not that I'm overly paranoid or anything...
I imagine the comments will be full of complaints about things not working even though it is a Beta. Much like the complaints against Diaspora even though theirs was an Alpha release.
So the important things first: Performance is VASTLY improved over the first beta. The first beta was basically unusable on my Captivate (AT&T Galaxy S). This beta, on the other hand, is actually fairly snappy. The JavaScript performance is excellent as well; in fact, on the Sunspider benchmark I scored around 3600 ms, which is a staggering 2000 ms faster than Dolphin HD. I can even run some of the IE9 Test Drive demos at acceptable framerates, bizarrely, and Google Instant works just fine on the desktop version of Google.com. But therein lies a major problem: Firefox mobile still doesn't broadcast an Android user agent. I tried several sites that I know direct me to mobile versions in both the default browser and Dolphin, including Google, Engadget, and Ars. All of them take me to the desktop version of the page in Firefox. When you manually go to mobile versions, nothing recognizes your phone as an Android phone, so for example you get a generic version of Google.com/m rather than the special Android one. This beta still doesn't work with the Froyo flash plug-in, either. And while the font rendering is better, it's still nowhere near as easy to read as the stock browser. Overall, I'm glad to see this project is being taken seriously and a lot of progress is being made. But it's still a long way from being able to replace the stock Android browser for most, I'm afraid.
I tried several sites that I know direct me to mobile versions in both the default browser and Dolphin, including Google, Engadget, and Ars. All of them take me to the desktop version of the page in Firefox.
Odd. If I go to http://arstechnica.com using Firefox 4 beta 2 on my Nokia N900 I get the mobile version of the site automatically.
Firefox on Android supports NTLM authentication with websites which the built in web browser does not support. This is required to connect to some of my companies internal sites which are setup to use NTLM authentication.
As a web developer I strongly disagree with the notion that a phone should include anything as specific as "Android" in the UA string. It just means every mobile-aware web developer out there needs to SPECIFICALLY cater for Android phones (otherwise there would not be a need for the string, would it?). The right way to do these kind of things is with CSS and it's 'handheld' media profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html#at-media-rule). And on top of it, don't go ape with fixed widths ;-) You can also get the screen size via client side scripting host (Javascript) if you care about such things. Most of the time, if the site has been designed well, it will work just fine on any modern Internet-enabled phone.
I think you would agree with me that polluting UA strings with specific product names is a BAD IDEA. You would say "yeah, they are already have been doing it for years with IE/Mozilla etc" but in any case, this has never been designed as a courtesy for web developers to make decisions as to what version of the site to serve. It's the last resort piece of information, in case you really need to know what browser user is running.
If you really feel strong about this, at least think about including a profile of the browser instead - like the string "mobile", not "Android". Because otherwise we would soon need "iPhone", "Symbian", "Windows CE" or whatever mobile product is on the market at a particular moment...
Damn right. UA detection is a hack, plain and simple. CSS is the way this should've always been done.
Hell, that all-caps VASTLY of yours is an understatement.
Fennec 3 takes ~minute to fully start on my n900. First it takes a long time to appear, and then there's an even longer wait for it to become responsive. I used it only because the alternatives (Nokia's MicroB, Opera Mobile) are a bad joke for basic functionality.
Fennec 4b1 -- well, it's beyond words.
Fennec 4b2 -- 12 seconds to start, fully responsive the moment the UI appears. It's also insanely faster -- Fennec 3 takes a couple of seconds to refresh after a scroll, Fennec 4b2 doesn't let me notice the redraw.
What I miss is double click on a div zooming it to the screen width -- most web pages have margins that waste the precious display area, and multi-column layouts make absolutely no sense on a 4 inch screen. I guess it's either moved to some other command or perhaps a configurable option; lemme continue the search for it.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Morbidly obese patient is now slightly less morbidly obese.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Browser sniffing is a cardinal sin, of course, but it's an interesting data point for the statistics.
Would you happen to know how one can recognize a handheld (in a good abstract way CSS does) BEFORE serving the page to said handheld? Because CSS only kicks in after the page is at client side. Of course it can reshape the content to a great degree, including hiding and rewriting it, but there is the waste of having to send it in the first place, knowing that it will be "discarded" at client side. Also, many handhelds benefit from less page weight to have to wait for and parse, that's where it would help too...
Has /. turned into the Firefox cheer brigade? How about articles about Seamonkey which also *just* arrived at the Beta stage. Or Opera 11 which is in testing stage.
It seems all /. talks about is Firefox and IE.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
> Some notable improvements over the initial beta release include
> 'reduced memory usage, improved text rendering and a 60% install
> size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB).'
Can I run Fennec on my desktop? Pretty please? Scrap the crap they call a desktop browser, and use Fennec instead.
I remember way back when Mozilla 0.9x was a painfully slow and bloated browser-cum-mailclient-newsreader-HTMLgenerator. People were yelling and screaming for a *LIGHTWEIGHT WEB BROWSER* dammit. Phoenix was such a revelation, as it blew the doors off of Mozilla, and used a lot less space.
Now Firefox is a painfully slow and bloated browser-cum-RDBMS-cum-internet_app_platform. Can we please have a fast browser... period... end of story? BTW...
$ ll -og /usr/portage/distfiles/firefox-3.6.11.source.tar.bz2 /usr/portage/distfiles/firefox-3.6.11.source.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 51423291 Oct 26 23:42
Yes, the *BZIPPED TARBALL* is 51 megs fer-cryin-out-loud.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Well, I care since HTC Desire only comes with 100mb of internal space and that's where applications initially install.
Only with FroYo came the ability to install on SD card, but that's up to the developer to enable.
And Mozilla didn't enable that in beta 3.
Don't know if it's enabled in beta 4.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -