21
Dec
unnamed

Firefox 9 For Android Sheds Beta, Brings Tablet Interface And Faster Startup

Posted by in Applications, News

The team behind Firefox for Android teased the upcoming release with a tablet-friendly design back in late August, and the final version of FF9 just landed in the Android Market. The update not only features a specialized tablet interface, but also boosts performance and startup speed and brings some HTML5 tweaks to the scene, like camera input support and form validation.

SC20111221-090516 SC20111221-090503

The tablet interface offers some nice features over its phone-centric counterpart, like full-screen browsing in portrait, optimized tabs for easy thumb-switching between open pages, and a quick access buttons on the Action Bar. The overall feel and functionality of the finalized app is definitely a big improvement over the beta version that I tried when it was first announced, but the FF team has made one serious omission in this release: the option to change the user agent.

16
Oct

Flash Isn't Coming To Firefox For Android Until 2012, But The Latest Nightly Builds Have It Now

Posted by in Applications, News

Firefox is finally getting flash support. Support for the plugin landed in the nightly builds a few days ago - meaning you can try it yourself, right now.

If you want to experience the magic of flash on Firefox, you can try out the latest trunk build right here (pick the .apk file). A word of warning though, it crashes. A lot.

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It really works!

Luckily they've got tons of time to work the bugs out. According to the bugzilla filing, it's not going to be ready until Firefox Ten. If the desktop version is any indication, that'll be launching around January 31, 2012.

20
May
image

Mozilla Launches Separate Firefox For Android Beta App To Test New Features Early

Posted by in Applications, News

Firefox for Android has come a long way since the project hatched as "Fennec" many months ago - there is no doubt about that. What started as a bloated, slow, and buggy pile of crap (really, it was bad), is now one of the greatest browsers Android has to offer (add-ons ftw!). Don't get me wrong - it's still lacking quite a few features - notably, Flash support, faster font redraw on zooming, better startup times, etc., but Mozilla knows this and is working hard on the next version - 5.0.

In order to test out new (but potentially buggy) builds, the company decided to introduce a separate Beta app into the Market today.

22
Mar
firefox 4 logo

Firefox 4 RC For Android Comes To The Android Market

Posted by in Applications, News

Mozilla has announced a release candidate of Firefox 4 for Android and for Nokia Maemo.

firefox 4 image2 firefox 4 image

Firefox 4 RC for Android features several updates including faster scrolling, a better and more responsive version of Firefox Sync, and an overall improvement in the user experience. Other features include: text reformatting on zoom, a slimmed down on-screen form helper and find-in-page function, copy and paste in form fields, character encoding and other smaller improvements since Beta 3.

Codenamed Fennec, the first version of Firefox for Android appeared in August of last year.  Soon after a beta version of Firefox 4 for Android was launched in the Android Market.

18
Mar
abp

Adblock Plus Adds Support For Firefox Mobile 4

Posted by in Android OS, Applications, News

Blocking obnoxious ads while browsing the web is something that I believe should come built-in to all browsers, or at least those on mobile devices with limited bandwidth. Although the beta version of Firefox 4 for Android (aka Fennec) released some time back, it was only yesterday that Adblock Plus released a development build for its seminal ad-blocking extension for the mobile version of Firefox.

According to the Adblock Plus devs, everything seems to be working smoothly, save for the following:

  • do-not-track support is not working; and
  • the number of synchronous requests needs to be reduced (on the to-do list)

Unfortunately, the user interface of ABP on the mobile version of Firefox is quite limited as you are only able to subscribe to one filter at a time.

07
Oct
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Firefox For Android Finally Hits Beta Status, Set To Silence Critics

Posted by in Applications, News

As we've seen in the last few days, The Artist Formerly Known As Fennec has really been hitting its stride lately. Riding on this wave of improvement comes a shiny new Beta status, making Fennec now, officially, Firefox 4 For Android Beta.

We won't labour you with details, as many words have been written before about F4FA's arduous journey towards usability. Just get out there and download it.

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You might also want to check out Mozilla's official blog post, and their little promotional video at the source link below. Sadly, our main man Matt Brubeck is not featured, but he's probably too busy making Fen*cough*Firefox 4 for Android Beta even better.

06
Oct
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Fennec Dev Discusses Differences, Benefits, And Challenges Of Bringing Firefox To Android

Posted by in Applications, Development, News

We've seen Fennec (or Firefox for Android as it's now called) gradually progressing over the last few months, reaching a state of real usability in the last couple of weeks. There are many excited by Fennec's journey and the ability have a browser with near-full-desktop functionality, but it seems that even more struggle to see a place for another browser on their phone. After all, the stock Android browser is lightning-quick and works well enough for a pretty satisfying web experience.

Mozilla mobile developer Matt Brubeck recently penned a blog post set to explain the reasoning behind Firefox for Android, and why he believes it is a worthwhile addition to both Android and Mozilla families.

27
Aug
fennec for android

Firefox Mobile (Fennec) For Android Hits Alpha, Introduces New Features Including Electrolysis

Posted by in Applications, Apps/Games, News

Mozilla Firefox for Android (also known as Fennec during development) has now reached a major milestone, with the release of the Alpha version being announced in a Mozilla blog post today by Stuart Parmenter. Joining Firefox Mobile as it enters the Alpha stage are a few more features than had been previously planned for implementation.

Amongst these features is Electrolysis, a very welcome addition to the latest builds, which separates the user interface and the content loading on the page in to two different processes, ensuring that the browser remains responsive even if a large page is being loaded. Stuart Parmenter commented that

This Alpha release includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content.

13
Aug

Firefox For Mobile Gaining Greater Stability And New Features As Fennec Edges Towards Version 2 And Alpha Status

Posted by in Applications, News

It would be nice to say that Fennec has really been coming along of late. But honestly, from an end-user’s point of view, that’s not really the case; it’s still a massive memory hog, crashes seemingly at random, and takes up an inordinate amount of your phone’s internal storage. However, it is definitely growing gradually more usable, and beneath the rather sluggish front-end, some serious changes are taking place.

The Road To Fennec 2

If you've been following Mozilla Mobile dev @mbrubeck, you may have read about some under-the-hood improvements going on lately, as the internals of the browser undergo a complete reworking.

19
May
Get The Latest Version Of Fennec Every Day - Mozilla Now Making Nightly Builds Of Firefox For Android

Get The Latest Version Of Firefox For Android Every Day - Mozilla Now Making Nightly Builds Of Fennec

Posted by in Applications, News

Excited about finally having Firefox running on your Android phone? Not so fast - Firefox for Android, codenamed Fennec, is still in early alpha stages. However, an alpha build released a few weeks ago has given us a decent preview and instilled hope of a great browser to come.

After being quiet for some time, Stuart Parmenter and Vladimir Vukićević, Mozilla engineers, today announced that they had launched the Fennec nightly build system.

This means that every night the latest and greatest (or buggiest, depending on the day) Fennec build will be uploaded for everyone to see, test, and report bugs on.