It may have become the underdog now compared to the ubiquity of Chrome, but Firefox isn't letting that excuse hinder its improvement and development. The latest beta of Firefox for Android proves that by fixing some issues, adding support for requested regional features, and enhancing performance thanks to a few HTML5 additions.
Most notable are the srcset attribute and <picture> element support in HTML5. These allow web developers to point to various sizes of the same image that load based on the device you are browsing on. When used appropriately, the <picture> syntax only downloads the image for its specific context (screen resolution, size, orientation), and hence leads to more responsive page loading.
Other changes include an Azerbaijani locale and Ruby annotation support. The latter is a set of extra characters that appear with regular text to explain meaning or pronunciation, and is mostly used in Japan.
The full changelog with the detailed list of modifications and features is below, along with the link to grab Firefox Beta for free from the Play Store. If the update isn't live for you yet, we have an APK Mirror link to help with that.
What’s New
- NEW: Ruby annotation support
- NEW: Locale added: Azerbaijani (az)
- CHANGED: autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username/password fields
- CHANGED: URL parser avoids doing percent encoding when setting the Fragment part of the URL, and percent decoding when getting the Fragment in line with the URL spec
- CHANGED: RegExp.prototype.source now returns "(?:)" instead of the empty string for empty regular expressions
- CHANGED: Page load times improved by speculative connection warmup
- HTML5: WebSocket now available in Web Workers
- HTML5: Implemented srcset attribute and <picture> element for responsive images
- HTML5: Implemented DOM3 Events KeyboardEvent.code
- HTML5: BroadcastChannel API implemented (more at hacks.mozilla.org)
- DEVELOPER: WebRTC now has multistream and renegotiation support
Source: Mozilla, APK Mirror