The first major update to Firefox for Android (download) since January has arrived, and it brings with it a new interface, some new features, and a new approach to Android for Mozilla.
The company released the first stable version of Firefox for Android at the same time that it overhauled Firefox for PCs, back in March 2011. Barely six months after that, the company decided that the original Firefox for Android just wasn't good enough. With a responsiveness rarely seen by large organizations, Mozilla changed course and began to work on a different Android browser.
"In the fall of last year, we realized [the original Firefox for Android] was not good enough, not performing the way we wanted it to," Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering, explained over the phone yesterday. "So we made the call in October to rewrite it."
The new version of Firefox for Android continues the version numbering scheme that Mozilla has been pursuing since March 2011's debut of the rapid release cycle -- it's listed as version 14 -- but Nightingale confessed that it's really a new 1.0. More went into the browser, he said, than just building the interface on native code.
"Re-writing the native UI we knew would take three to four months, which gave us the instant start up," he said. The old Firefox for Android suffered from a severe lag from when you tapped its icon to the point where the browser finished loading. But, Nightingale said, "the panning and zooming performance required building a whole new architecture."
Additional problems included Adobe Flash integration. Nightingale said that Firefox engineers knew Flash had to be supported, because so many people who used Firefox were asking for it and because it was still used on a majority of sites that offer rich-media content. However, he said, coding Flash support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is different than it is for Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Android 2.2 Froyo, all three of which are different from Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
Firefox 14 for Android includes Flash support, as well as tap-to-play for plug-ins. This lets a site load with a tappable icon for playing the Flash content at will. It's beneficial both for faster page loading and for cutting down on bandwidth usage during these data capped times.
The company released the first stable version of Firefox for Android at the same time that it overhauled Firefox for PCs, back in March 2011. Barely six months after that, the company decided that the original Firefox for Android just wasn't good enough. With a responsiveness rarely seen by large organizations, Mozilla changed course and began to work on a different Android browser.
"In the fall of last year, we realized [the original Firefox for Android] was not good enough, not performing the way we wanted it to," Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering, explained over the phone yesterday. "So we made the call in October to rewrite it."
The new version of Firefox for Android continues the version numbering scheme that Mozilla has been pursuing since March 2011's debut of the rapid release cycle -- it's listed as version 14 -- but Nightingale confessed that it's really a new 1.0. More went into the browser, he said, than just building the interface on native code.
"Re-writing the native UI we knew would take three to four months, which gave us the instant start up," he said. The old Firefox for Android suffered from a severe lag from when you tapped its icon to the point where the browser finished loading. But, Nightingale said, "the panning and zooming performance required building a whole new architecture."
Additional problems included Adobe Flash integration. Nightingale said that Firefox engineers knew Flash had to be supported, because so many people who used Firefox were asking for it and because it was still used on a majority of sites that offer rich-media content. However, he said, coding Flash support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is different than it is for Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Android 2.2 Froyo, all three of which are different from Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
Firefox 14 for Android includes Flash support, as well as tap-to-play for plug-ins. This lets a site load with a tappable icon for playing the Flash content at will. It's beneficial both for faster page loading and for cutting down on bandwidth usage during these data capped times.
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