

Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 for Android - Garbage
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/03/29/mozilla-launches-firefox-4-for-android-allowing-users-to-take-the-power-and-customization-of-firefox-everywhere-2/

======
IgorPartola
It actually seems to flow pages better than the stock browser (Atrix running
Froyo). Specifically, <http://www.linux.org.ru> has tab on the left in the
proper position in Firefox while the stock browser puts it after the main
content div.

The mobile tabs are _awesome_. And I really like the fact that I can get to
the address bar while being half way into the page. The Awesome Bar is also,
well, _awesome_. I thought I might not like it, coming off of an iPhone, but
it actually works really well.

My only complaint so far is that spell checking does not appear to be turned
on, and capitalization does not work by default. Very frustrating when trying
to post comments to HN...

Set it to the default browser in a heartbeat.

------
ck2
By the way, I discovered there are desktop version of the mobile build
available for developers (Windows, Mac and Linux)

<http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/>

Windows
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/w...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/win32-i686/)

Mac
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/m...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/macosx-i686/)

Linux
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/l...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/linux-i686/)

~~~
100tonmantis
Wow. I wish I could use this on my netbook but it doesn't seem to be useful
for much more than testing right now. Configuration and keyboard use is pretty
limited.

Really fast though.

------
gkoberger
My two favorite features:

\- Tabs are actually usable.

\- With Sync, you can walk away from your desktop and have your tabs (and
history/bookmarks/passwords) on your phone.

(Disclaimer: I work at Mozilla, but have nothing to do with mobile.)

~~~
windsurfer
I want to use Sync, but I'm really concerned with the security of it. How do I
know my data is safe?

Can I install a sync server on my own domain?

~~~
sp332
Data is encrypted client-side, so even Mozilla can't read it. If someone hacks
Mozilla, they could get your _encrypted_ data, but without your passphrase,
they won't be able to read it. On the downside, if you forget your passphrase,
you won't be able to read your data either (you have to wipe your account and
start over).

~~~
windsurfer
Are you sure? According to this:
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.1/Setup> it says the passphrase
you use is sent in the clear (over HTTPS) to mozilla every time you get the
data. That implies that while the data may be stored encrypted client-side,
it's decrypted or at least verified server-side.

~~~
gkoberger
That is an old page, back when it was a labs project called Weave.

Try this: [http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-firefox-
sync#w_what...](http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-firefox-sync#w_what-
is-a-sync-key-and-why-do-i-need-one)

There is absolutely no way for Mozilla to get your data, even if subpoenaed.
And, if for some reason you still don't trust it, you can easily set it up on
your own server.

~~~
ww
>>There is absolutely no way for Mozilla to get your data, even if subpoenaed

There needs to be more assurances like this in the world.

------
ck2
Does contentEditable/designMode work on it by any chance?

If so, it will be the first mobile browser to support it.

Basic test here: <http://html5demos.com/contenteditable>

or much more advanced here: <http://ckeditor.com/demo>

~~~
IgorPartola
Just tried it. It does!

~~~
ck2
Wow this is huge news!

Others might not appreciate it but that means it's the first mobile browser
that rich, WYSIWYG editors like CKEditor and TinyMCE will finally work!

(iPhone and native Android do NOT support contentEditable despite being a
webkit branch)

This is history repeating itself where Mozilla/Firefox competition will force
other browsers to finally improve their game.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
When did that happen the first time? As I recall, Chrome started the second
browser wars, which even caused IE to try again. FF was unable to do that.

~~~
mbrubeck
Microsoft didn't even _have_ anyone working on IE for most of the five years
between IE6 and IE7 (2001 - 2006). Without competitors like Firefox to keep
web standards and cross-browser compatibility alive through that era, it would
have taken a lot longer to dig ourselves out of the IE6 era.

(Remember when IE had 90% market share, and web developers routinely wrote IE-
only code?)

~~~
MatthewPhillips
But IE7 wasn't much of an upgrade over IE6. Neither was IE8. Browsers didn't
take the next step until Google got fed up with javascript rendering speeds
and took it into their own hands; now every browser is fast.

Firefox AND Opera made the web bearable in the years between IE6 and Chrome,
but they hardly are responsible for the arms race that is taking place now.

~~~
bzbarsky
IE8 is a huge upgrade over IE6. For one thing, at ship time it implemented the
entirety of the then-current CSS 2.1 draft Just comparing it to IE7, it added
generated content, automatic counters and quotes, tons of fixes to floats,
outlines, lots of box model bugfixes. the list goes on and on. It's not a huge
upgrade in terms of _Javascript_, but in terms of CSS it's light and day when
you compare to IE6. Oh, and IE8 moved to a process-per-tab model.

The thing I think you're missing in the evolution of IE after the team was
disbanded post-IE6 is that it takes time to build up a project team from 0 to
hundreds of people, especially when the codebase is preexisting and large. IE7
was them starting to put a team together again, doing catchup on obvious UI
features like tabbed browsing. IE8 was them finally having enough people to
execute well on some things (CSS 2.1, process-per-tab) and try to play catchup
on other things (JavaScript performance). IE9 is them having a team big enough
to work on all parts of the browser at once.

You also have your history slightly wrong on the JS perf. Chrome was first
announced on September 1, 2008; before that some people knew that Google was
working on a browser, but the details were secret. The WebKit project
initially landed the SquirrelFish Extreme jit on September 18, 2008; it's
pretty clear that this was in the works before Chrome's existence was
announced. Mozilla landed the initial Tracemonkey implementation in their main
development tree in mid-August 2008 (weeks before Chrome was announced), and
had been working on it for some time before that. So all three (Firefox,
Safari, Chrome) were working on JITs in parallel before Chrome was announced;
it's not like Chrome shipped a JIT and everyone else suddenly decided they had
to do it as well. Had Chrome never existed, Firefox and Safari (and Opera,
which joined in on the game in early 2009) would still have competed for
faster javascript; IE9 would still have ended up doing a jit, or risking being
left in the dust.

Oh, and the Sunspider benchmark, for example, was first released in December
2007, when both WebKit and Mozilla were actively working on their
interpreters' performance and starting to work on the JITs they'd have by
September 2008. Again, the competition for faster JavaScript was very much in
play already.

Now Chrome has contributed to the competition, as have all the other players.
But they sure didn't start it.

~~~
mdaai
"The WebKit project initially landed the SquirrelFish Extreme jit on September
18, 2008; it's pretty clear that this was in the works before Chrome's
existence was announced."

In fact, the Apple WebKit folks have said that they began the Squirrelfish
Extreme project the day after Tracemonkey was announced. It was quite an
engineering accomplishment to have an initial stab at a JIT in a month and
have it shipped to users in a few more, especially considering it took Mozilla
about a year (Summer '08 - June '08) to ship theirs. And everyone knew about
Tamarin's development over the previous couple years - so it ended up being a
really amazing coincidence that all three JITs were announced within a one
month period.

------
jmillikin
I've been using the beta for a month or so, and it's miles better than the
stock Android browser. Notable features:

\- supports <video> and <audio>

\- fixed-size divs (used for multiple scrollable page sections) work properly

\- Pages are rendered practically identically to desktop Firefox/Chrome; the
Android browser sometimes does weird things to pages with complex CSS.

While I haven't noticed any improvements in page rendering speed, but the
browser UI itself is more responsive.

~~~
karl_nerd
It also supports using the accelerometer in javascript!
[http://karlwestin.posterous.com/javascript-accelerometer-
on-...](http://karlwestin.posterous.com/javascript-accelerometer-on-ios-
android-via-f)

------
trotsky
Does anyone know what the hardware requirements are? The market will let me
install it on a samsung galaxy but not an lg optimus. Is it the cpu speed of
the optimus or something else? I can't seem to find a list of requirements
anywhere.

EDIT:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Req...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Requirements)

It is the CPU generation. "Release builds of Firefox require a phone with an
ARMv7 processor" and the Optimus has an ARMv6.

Is anyone from mozilla or otherwise familiar with how badly it would run if I
built it myself with a v6 target?

~~~
mbrubeck
Hi, I'm a member of the mobile Firefox team at Mozilla.

Building for ARMv7-only lets us use the Thumb-2 instruction set, which results
in code that is smaller, faster, and uses less memory.

We used to have ARMv6 builds available, but at this point the browser is not
really optimized enough to run well on older (or low-end) devices. And since
we were not actively testing or supporting those builds, the code now has some
crashing bugs (probably related to the JavaScript JIT) that show up only on
ARMv6 builds. Without fixing those bugs, you can't actually run Firefox on
ARMv6.

We continue to reduce memory and CPU usage, and if it it gets good enough to
support these devices then we might start working on it for a future version.

~~~
trotsky
Thanks very much for the straight dope!

------
kenjackson
The benchmark numbers seem great, but actual browsing perf doesn't seem any
better if not worse than the stock Nexus S browser. Just curious if Mozilla
spends a lot of time optimizing benchmarks or the top 1000 sites?

I'm just having trouble reconciling their incredible benchmark numbers with
how it feels to simply browse the web.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
They've been working on a variety of performance indicators:

[http://blog.lassey.us/2011/03/29/mobile-firefox-
performance-...](http://blog.lassey.us/2011/03/29/mobile-firefox-performance-
overview/)

~~~
kenjackson
Yeah, that's the page I had read and was expecting perf that killed the Nexus
S stock browser. But I'm not sure if its any better. Do you see better perf on
your device? Are there some pages that show the perf delta more than others
(besides Mozilla built showcase pages?).

~~~
mbrubeck
Right now, the only _big_ speed advantage is in processor-intensive
JavaScript. You can see this in any JS-intensive application. For example, run
the performance tests here in Firefox vs. stock Android browser:
<http://lookups.pageforest.com/test/perf-test.html>

(These performance tests are based on a JS library to do efficient dictionary
lookups; more info at <https://github.com/mckoss/lookups>)

In other areas, like startup speed, we know that Firefox for Android is still
catching up to other browsers. It's improved a lot over the last year, and
we'll keep on improving it.

------
doron
oh a Saviour has come. Adblock plus for mobile. This is the one killer tool i
have been waiting for.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
If you have a rooted phone, you can always use AdFree. It adds entries to your
/etc/hosts so it blocks ads in _all_ apps.

~~~
doron
Thanks, i will try it out. I am actually ok with most ads on apps, i dont find
them as intrusive, the browser on the other hand is a nightmare.

------
blinkingled
It's great to have another credible browser for Android and Firefox 4 kinda
works OK on my Xoom but there are two issues that make me hesitant to use it -
Fonts - there is some "non-nativeness" there - they look blurry and -
Heaviness - the native browser on the Xoom is just insanely light and fast
(couple crashes everyday aside) but Firefox _feels_ heavier to use. Part of
that might be drawing, part may be slow startup and some just general UI
element sizes.

------
cdr
Kind of a bummer that they require an ARMv7 processor - won't install on
lower-end but still very decent models like LG Optimus S/V.

~~~
chihiro
I have a HTC. Does it uses an ARMv7 ?

~~~
mbrubeck
See the list at
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Req...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Requirements)

------
aw3c2
Can somebody find a direct download link for the .apk file? I tried using the
Mozilla website but ended up in eternal redirection and flashy pages. I really
do not want to waste 14MB (!) of my precious bandwidth on a browser
installation. That would be 5% of my monthly bandwidth.

~~~
mbrubeck
You can download the APK directly from here:
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/a...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/android-r7/en-
US/)

You can also search for "Firefox" in the Android Market on your phone (connect
to WiFi if possible, if you want avoid cellular data charges).

(By the way, if you literally ended up in a redirect loop, please let me know
so we can fix it.)

~~~
spravin
Here's an easier url (goes to the same .apk): <http://j.mp/firedroid>

------
joebadmo
Anyone else having user-agent issues? Google reader, for example, shows up as
what looks like the dumb phone mobile site, not the smart phone mobile site
(which is great) or the desktop site. And I can't find a setting to change the
user-agent.

~~~
mbrubeck
This add-on will let you change the user agent:
<https://addons.mozilla.org/mobile/addon/phony/>

For Google Reader, you don't need to change the useragent; you can just go to
<http://www.google.com/reader/i/>

Reader works well in Firefox, but many of Google's mobile sites use WebKit-
specific markup, and will _not_ work correctly in Firefox if you change the
user-agent header to iPhone or Android.

------
Osiris
I downloaded the browser and installed 3 small extensions. It asked to
"Restart", which I assumed meant the application. Instead it reboot the phone.

After that, it just hung on the Loading screen sucking up 100% CPU. I searched
to see if I could manually delete the extensions, but they aren't saved on the
SD card from what I could find, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the
application and now it actually loads.

They really need to put some safeguards in place to make sure extensions don't
crash the browser like that. Having to uninstall and reinstall just to remove
a bad extension is really problematic.

------
ralphc
I assume that add-ons need to be written specifically for the Android browser
- no delicious add-on listed, will need to stick with Dolphin HD for now.

------
suprgeek
This is awesome news..just trying it out. Minor quibble why is the installer a
Huge 14 Mb in Size? On a desktop FF4 is a 12Mb download so what gives?

~~~
mbrubeck
On Android, we ship all the locales in one package (since the Android Market
doesn't have a simple way for us to deliver different packages to different
locales). That accounts for part of the difference in size.

We're working on various ways to reduce the size, including moving the locale
files into separate files that are downloaded at installation time.

~~~
suprgeek
Thank you for the answer. Please implement this quickly, I want to recommend
FF to pretty much everybody and a huge honkin download is not a good sign on a
mobile phone.

------
ddlatham
Can anyone compare it to the Dolphin browser?

~~~
aw3c2
I switched from the last beta to Dolphin some months ago because (iirc):

Firefox did not support gestures. It was very slow to start. It did not reflow
text (properly or at all?).

At least the reflow seems to be included now so I guess I try again.

edit: Installed it. Tried zooming in on reddit, hn and metafilter. Failed to
reflow on all of them. Reflowing after zoom is enabled in the options, at
least I think it is (the stupid apple slider shows the yes in blue, I guess
that means it is on. Or does it switch on if I press it? I never got the
design of those buttons.)

Apparently no way to exit the application.

Takes guesstimated 10 seconds to cold-start. 3s for Dolphin.

~~~
starwed
Yeah, those buttons always bugged me... the design could have been a lot
cleaner.

I'm not sure if Firefox Mobile has the same support for theming that the
desktop does, but if so I imagine they'll be some nice themes for it
eventually. :)

------
pandeiro
No text reflow and no text selection turn the web into a giant set of PDFs.
Tab mechanism is cool. Otherwise disappointing. Uninstalled.

~~~
manveru
I have no idea why nobody mentions that copy&paste in forms isn't implemented.

It's of little use for me without that.

~~~
mbrubeck
That's because copy/paste in web forms _is_ implemented. It was fixed after
beta 5, but before release candidate 1:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611741>

------
absconditus
Less powerful hardware does not seem like the best place for Firefox.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Independent test by people like Microsoft and Cnet seem to indicate that
Firefox is doing well with resource usage. What makes you think otherwise?:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/28/browser-
power-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/28/browser-power-
consumption-leading-the-industry-with-internet-explorer-9.aspx)

<http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20047314-12.html>

~~~
nextparadigms
Microsoft is an independent source? What?

~~~
tedunangst
They are independent of mozilla and the people who make firefox.

------
skbohra123
Damn, I need 512MB RAM for a browser. Feels so bad.

------
akamaka
How does it compare to Safari on iPhone?

