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Firefox 4 Beta For Mobile Now Faster and Sleeker

Posted by Soulskill on from the almost-like-some-sort-of-fox dept.

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."

8 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. 43mb to 17mb? by iONiUM · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:43mb to 17mb? by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 4, Funny

      Usually when such a drastic change occurs, it means they originally included many things that weren't necessary.

      Meanwhile, at Mozilla labs:

      Developer 1: Hey Bob, did you run strip after you built the final release?
      Developer 2: Ummm... (looks at shoes)
      Developer 1: Oh Bob, you're such a silly sausage!

      (I imagine that Mozilla labs is a utopia where no one ever gets shouted at)

      --
      Summation 2
    2. Re:43mb to 17mb? by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      That's not the case - we both care a lot about this, and did not include unnecessary stuff. See this blog post, specifically the section "Installation size: Problems and solutions", for the reasons.

      Basically, Firefox has some unique challenges to overcome, in that unlike other mobile browsers, it includes a complete web rendering engine (Gecko), unlike others which use the bundled WebKit. With some tricky methods (the custom linker mentioned there, and other stuff), it's now much better. You can also move a large part of it to SD now.

      We're going to continue working on this - we know how much users care about it, and so do we!

    3. Re:43mb to 17mb? by jac89 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Its due to a quirk of NDK apps on android. Before Firefox had to unpack its libraries and effectively have them in two places. Now they link back to the original packed files, its sightly slower but thats where the space savings comes from.

    4. Re:43mb to 17mb? by RichiH · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > You can also move a large part of it to SD now.

      That single sentence convinced me to give it another spin. Flash on my Desire is _extremely_ precious. Sure, this problem will more or less solve itself in a year or two, but when I see a _game_ gobble up 30 MiB, I truly question the developers' sanity and technical ability. It's nice that you guys are different :)

      BTW: New & faster Firefox for N810? Pretty please? Or should I stop hoping to really use that beast? A clear no is better than an endless maybe.

      In any case, thanks for your work :)

  2. Re:14mb for a mobile browser is sleek? by h4rr4r · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have a 16 GB SD card in my phone, why do I care about a measly 17MB?

  3. Re:GPS? WTF? This is a browser! by lowlymarine · · Score: 3, Informative

    All browsers need GPS location to pass on to sites that use it, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

  4. Re:A huge improvement, but still some major issues by amn108 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...