
Hands-on: Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/hands-on-firefox-for-android-may-become-your-favorite-android-browser/
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51Cards
I run FireFox Aurora on all my mobile devices now and _finally_ mobile
browsing is what I have always wanted it to be. It's very fast, renders very
nicely including CSS3 niceties, has Flash support (yes, still handy), and the
new UI is well thought out IMO. Some nit-picky issues still (zooming is still
quirky and fixed position items move horizontally when the page is panned) but
extremely rarely do I use anything else. I honestly can't rave enough about
the version coming down the pipe.

~~~
altrego99
What's wrong with Maxthon? It does all these, and probably yet a lot more, but
being 2.18mb in size.

~~~
khuey
Maxathon is 2.18 MB because it doesn't ship its own rendering engine; it uses
the system webkit.

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ZeroGravitas
I've been using this in beta for a while now. One thing it still doesn't do is
use Android intents properly so e.g. if you follow a link to Youtube or the
Android Market it won't automatically open the relevant Android app for that
content. You can install an app called Choose Browser
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashima.choosebrowser&hl=fr))
which lets you "share" a page to it, it will then immediately ask you which
what other app you want, which will be your list of installed browsers and any
App that responds to that particular URL (e.g. the Youtube or Market App).

~~~
mbrubeck
The patch to fix that is awaiting review and should land in nightly builds
soon: <http://bugzil.la/653833>

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napoleoncomplex
Did a quick test-run on my Xperia Ray, and I have a few questions/comments if
anyone can answer them:

\- Is it possible to zoom to a readable level without pinch-to-zoom (double
tap is more of a mini-zoom)?

\- The text size settings seem to not have any effect, I even hard-restared
the app, yet the font size seems the same?

\- When zooming with pinch, the text doesn't adapt to the new zoom level, so
it's either unreadable text due to the size or unreadable text due to having
to scroll for every word.

I have a feeling I'm really terrible at using this app, but so far I haven't
discovered anything in the menus that would help me.

Chrome is downright unusable on the Ray compared to the stock (don't know if
it's the low memory of the Ray or just the "beta" status of Chrome), so I'm
still left wandering around for better choices, was hoping this would be it as
FF is my browser of choice on the desktop. So far, not looking good :).

~~~
mbrubeck
Firefox reformats text by enlarging it based on the width (like mobile Safari)
rather than by re-wrapping it as you zoom (like Android or Opera Mobile).

This means that when you double-tap on some text, it should zoom to the width
of the text and that text should already be at a readable size. The "text
size" preference determines how much the text is enlarged. It may not work on
some pages because we use lots of heuristics to determine whether reformatting
text will break the layout, and we are still working on tuning those
heuristics.

~~~
napoleoncomplex
Did some further testing on the 4 websites I actually visit on my mobile, 2 of
them have specific mobile versions which look good, 2 of them don't have
mobile versions (Hacker News is one of those), and the default zoom is much
too small to read anything when double tapping.

All 4 sites load what seems like 10 times faster than the stock, so the thing
definitely flies in terms of loading. Based on that I'd switch in a heartbeat,
but the zooming kills it. Do you think there will be any options for word wrap
and the like in the future? Though I realise I might be in an extreme
minority, as the Ray has an hdpi resolution screen despite it being only 3.3
inches, which amplifies the issue.

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polshaw
Just a heads up that adblock is available for ff-android (dev version i
think). All i'm waiting for is modify-headers and it'll be almost as good as
desktop!

loving the recent firefoxes, although aurora seems to crsh a bit for me-- by
far the best mobile browser now IMO. The tab selection could be better in
landscape though; 80% of the width is unused. Idea: press tab button and move
finger l/r to 'scroll' through tab selections (select on release)? Also i wish
there was a refresh button in the same spot as 'stop'.

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iuqiddis
I'd like to see a one-finger method for switching tabs in the next version.
What I mean by this is the following: On larger phones (pretty much all the
new phones), its hard (for most people) to reach the top of the screen to
toggle the tab changing button.

Besides that, changing a tab is at least a 2-tap process. The Chrome browser
allows tab switching by swiping the edge of the screen; Dolphin HD allows tab
switching by pressing the volume buttons; even the default browser allows
faster tab switching than firefox as the navigation bar can be accessed by
pivoting on the edge of the screen (not on by default).

I use firefox on the desktop, and I'd love to use it as my default browser on
android as well. For now, I'm using Chrome. Works well enough for me.

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fratido
For everyone with an incompatible ARMv6 device: I installed the last Nightly
Build from [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/tinderbox-
buil...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/tinderbox-
builds/mozilla-central-android-armv6/) on my ZTE Blade with Custom ICS and
haven't run into any troubles yet. It feels quite sleek, well done Mozilla!

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padobson
I'm typing this using on my ASUS Transform Prime using the keyboard dock, with
the Nightly Build APK of the latest Firefox browser

My initial reaction is that its its incredibly smooth and responsive -
something I have found lacking from other browsers

The stock browser is reliable, but it tends to render pages weirdly and
sometimes UI elements can become counter intuitive - probably because most web
developers aren't targeting it

And the latest update for the Beta Version of Chrome is completely unusable on
the prime, it was crashing not more than 5 minutes into every browser session

This is pretty nice so far, and I'll continue to use it until I find a good
reason not to.

~~~
bergie
Mozilla Sync is another great reason to use Firefox. I can easily open tabs
from my desktop to the tablet when I'm home...

~~~
skeletonjelly
For fairness Chrome does this too.

~~~
kinleyd
Yes it does. However in my case it is unusable as it constantly duplicates my
bookmarks (Ubuntu x64). Are there any fixes for this?

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krakensden
Does anyone else find that Hacker News is unreadable in it? The comment
threads have wildly variable font sizes that mean you have to zoom in and out
all the time.

~~~
cpeterso
Many Firefox developers (present company included :) read Hacker News, so
fixing these "font inflation" bugs are on our radar: <http://bugzil.la/707195>

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gatordan
I was excited to try this out then I encountered a strange issue: in every
website I visit when I type an & symbol into an input element it is replaced
with a 7 (e.g. I type "password&" the input shows "password7"). It's happening
across all sites for both text and more importantly password inputs so I can't
login to many of sites I regularly visit and really try the app. Anyone have
any ideas?

~~~
cpeterso
I'm a developer on the Firefox Mobile team and deal with most keyboard bugs.

What Android device are you using? Is only the & symbol affected?

Are you using Android's default virtual keyboard or a third-party virtual
keyboards? Every third-party keyboard has its own unique "quirks", so working
around them is like playing Whack-A-Mole. :)

~~~
gatordan
Thanks for they reply! I'm using a Droid Bionic, android version 2.3.4 and
this is on the default virtual keyboard. Ampersand is the only character
affected as far as i can tell.

~~~
cpeterso
I opened a new bug on Bugzilla to track this issue: <http://bugzil.la/768727>

That is a strange problem. I'm not sure why SHIFT+7 would be treated any
differently than SHIFT+6 or SHIFT+8. Part of the challenge of Android
development is getting a hold of all the devices that need to be tested. :)

~~~
cpeterso
btw, this bug is probably a regression from my "fix" for
<http://bugzil.la/755517> where some keyboards produced key code ALT+7 instead
of SHIFT+7.

Sorry! <:)

~~~
cpeterso
I landed a fix for this bug in Firefox's Nightly 16 and Aurora 15 channels.
The next update to Firefox 14 and Firefox Beta in the Google Play store should
include this fix, too.

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Symmetry
I think the important question for me is: does it insert stuff into the stack
of views I'll see when I hit the back button or not? It really annoyed me when
the default web-browser started doing this in ICS.

~~~
cpeterso
It does. Like you said, Chrome Beta and the ICS stock browser also using the
hardware Back button as a browser Back button, so this seems to be the UI
design consensus.

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michael_h
I'm not sure of it is just my phone or a general problem, but the beta version
is like browsing through jello. Most of the time, I have to guess if it has
registered a tap or not. Looks incredible though.

Note that Opera has little sluggishness on the same phone, even with a bunch
of tabs open.

~~~
polshaw
just you i think. my sgs works perfectly w/ firefox (although i use cm9 and
aurora).

~~~
michael_h
Oh? I'm just using the official v2.2 from Samsung. I'll have to install cm9
and see if that fixes some things.

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bad_user
Oh wow, so it's the best mobile browser I've used until now.

Unfortunately being pre-Beta means it's buggy and I encountered some issues in
the first minutes of usage, but I can't wait for it to get to the final
release.

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mtgx
Mozilla must've wanted to show this now before Google I/O. They must know
Google is making Chrome the default browser in Android 4.1 and beyond.

~~~
gcp
And Android 4.1 will get _what_ Market penetration? Chrome already doesn't
support the vast majority of phones out there, whereas this Firefox release
does.

Chrome can't compete on phones it doesn't run on.

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ww520
Just tried it out. It is actually very good. Wonder whether there's any
gesture support for browsing.

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wslh
I prefer Opera. Neither Firefox nor Chrome work submitting items to HN. Don't
know why

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wanderr
Apparently still no MP3 support for html5 audio. :(

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jvehent
It is already.. :)

