Mozilla has been offering mobile versions of the Firefox web browser for Android since earlier this year, but up until recently the browser was built using Mozilla’s own tools rather than native Android UI widgets. This week the developers released the first nightly builds of Firefox which use native Android tools to reduce memory usage and improve speed.

You can download the latest builds from the Firefox Nightly site. Keep in mind, these are pre-release versions of the browser, and may be rather buggy compared with the latest stable release available from the Android Market. But the latest nightlies will give you an idea of where Mozilla is going with Firefox.

The new browser does away with the menus to the left and right side of the screen. Instead you can pull up preferences, the add-ons manager, or bookmarks by tapping your Android menu button. You can open new tabs and access a list of open browser tabs by tapping the plus button next to the URL bar.

The new version is designed to support existing plugins for Firefox mobile and supports Android 2.2 and up.  Soon Mozilla will add an improved start page as well as the ability to synchronize your data between browsers. A tablet-friendly version is also in the works.

The first version of Firefox for Android tablets is now available for download. The latest nightly builds of Mozilla’s web browser for Android include a new user interface designed for Android devices with large, high resolution displays.

Firefox for tablets offers the same basic features as the smartphone version of the web browser, including Mozilla’s rendering engine, Firefox Sync capabilities which let you keep your bookmarks and other data synchronized with the desktop version of the app, and support for add-ons.

The tablet version also has a minimalist theme that’s designed to play well with Android 3.0 Honeycomb, an awesomebar with tabs letting you flip between bookmarks, history, and pages from your desktop browser, and a new way to view browser tabs. In landscape mode, all your open windows hang out in a persistent area on the left side of the screen. When you flip to portrait orientation, there’s an icon at the top of the screen which you can tap to view a list of browser tabs.

I’m not sold on the persistent tabs in landscape mode — just because Android tablets have more screen real estate than smartphones doesn’t mean people want to constantly look at thumbnails for websites they’re not currently reading. But at least Mozilla is trying new things. Many Android web browsers look the same, so it’s good to see someone thinking a bit outside of the box.

You can download the latest nightly build of Firefox Mobile for Android from Mozilla.

via Android Guys

Mozilla has long offered users and developers a chance to try out early builds of its desktop Firefox web browser before they were thoroughly tested and deemed ready for the public. Now Mozilla has also launched Aurora and Nightly channels for Firefox Mobile, allowing Android users to test out early versions of Firefox 5 and Firefox 6.

The Aurora channel currently lets you preview Firefox 5 on an Android device. It’s not as stable as the Firefox 4 web browser which is currently available for download from the Android Market, but it gives you a look at where Mozilla is going with the next version of Firefox.

If you install the Aurora build you’ll be prompted to update the browser about once a day as Mozilla pushes new features and bug fixes.

Mozilla is also now offering a Nightly build of the browser, which is even less stable — but which shows what Firefox 6 for Android may look like. This build is for people who want to test the bleeding edge features, or check to see if their Firefox add-ons will support upcoming versions of the web browser.

Firefox 6 Nightly will also update about once each day.

Honestly, at this point you won’t see much difference between the Aurora, Nightly, and stable channels. They all look pretty much like Firefox 4 at the moment. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The browser offers speedy page rendering, smooth zooming and scrolling, and support for add-ons, among other things. But as developers continue working on new features, they’ll show up first in the Aurora and Nightly builds.

You can install the new test versions of Firefox without uninstalling Firefox 4. All three can co-exist on your Android device and each will have its own set of data, which means you can uninstall one without affecting the others.

You can download each version of Firefox for ANdroid from the following links:

• Firefox 4 Stable: Android Market or firefox.com/m
• Firefox 5 Aurora: bit.ly/fennec5
• Firefox 6 Nightly:bit.ly/fennec6night

via Mark Finkle

Mozilla Firefox 4 is due out tomorrow, but it’s not the only Mozilla web browser getting an update today. The company has just launched the Release Candidate for Firefox 4 for Mobile. The mobile browser for Maemo and Android has been in beta testing for months, and now Mozilla is almost finished calling the app a test release.

If you’ve been following the browser’s progress you won’t find a lot of new features in Firefox 4 RC, but the developers have been working on improving speed and performance. The browser now loads pages more quickly, zooms more quickly, and you won’t see the checkerboard areas showing unloaded portions of web sites nearly as often.

There are a few important new feature in the release candidate: an option to reflow text on zoom. When you enable this setting, double-tapping on a column will rearrange text to look better on your screen. This makes text which would otherwise be too small to read much easier to see on a small screen.

Firefox Mobile also now supports copy and paste in all form fields, not just the URL field. There are also more text encoding options.

Another major change is support for installing add-ons without restarting the web browser.

You can find more details in the release notes.

Firefox  4 Mobile for Android and Maemo is available for download from Mozilla.com. You can also find the browser in the Android Market.

via madhava

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Mozilla has been testing early builds of Firefox for Google Android for months, but the web browser isn’t yet available from the Android Market. Instead you have to download it directly from Mozilla’s web site and install it manually. But it looks like that will change before the end of December.

Answering a question from a user who was having difficulty installing the browser, Mozilla’s Matt Brubeck said that the next major release of Firefox would be available for download from the Market “later this month.”

That should come as good news for AT&T Android customers, who are unable to “sideload” apps which aren’t available from the Android Market.

via Droid Life

Mozilla has released an updated beta version of Firefox for Google Android and Maemo Linux devices. Firefox 4 Beta 2 for Mobile has a far smaller memory footprint, and a built-in crash reporter. The browser is available in 10 different languages now, loads web pages about 40% faster than the last version, and reduces battery usage. The Android version also features a redesigned and much snappier user interface.

The new browser theme uses menus, icons, and other visual elements that are more in keeping with Google Android’s default look. There’s also a new “awesomescreen” which is sort of the mobile version of the Awesome Bar. Both are designed to give you access to your most important information all in one place.

The screen is broken up into four tabs: All Pages, Bookmarks, History, and Desktop. The Desktop tab will only work if you have Firefox Sync installed on your desktop browser, in which case your mobile device will show a list of open tabs on your desktop version of Firefox.

Like the desktop version of the Awesome Bar, the awesomescreen will alter the results as you type, pulling in data from your bookmarks and history to help you find what you’re looking for faster. You can also enter search queries in the same bar — and click the search icon for a drop-down list letting you change your default search engine.
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After months of alpha testing, Mozilla has dropped the Fennec codename and launched Firefox Beta for mobile. The latest version of the mobile browser is still in beta, which means there may still be some bugs and it’s possible that not all of the features have been finalized. But Mozilla is at least confident enough in the mobile browser to give it the Firefox name.
Firefox Beta for Mobile is available as a free download for Android 2.x and Maemo devices.

The browser includes mobile versions of some of the features we’ve come to expect from the desktop version of Firefox, including the awesome bar which lets you enter a URL or search term in one place. It also provides quick access to your bookmarks and history.

Firefox Mobile also includes Firefox Sync, which lets you synchronize some of your settings with the desktop version of Firefox — including open tabs, so you can continue reading a site easily on your phone when you walk away from your desk.

There’s also support for add-ons, although not all of the extensions designed for Firefox will work with the mobile browser. In fact, most won’t… for now.

Mozilla says the developers have been working on overall performance and responsiveness, which is something I definitely noticed last time I took an alpha version of Firefox Mobile for a spin. That said, it’s still not the fastest browser around, and Firefox Mobile is still a bit of a resource hog, taking up around 30MB of disk space which can be problematic if you have a phone like the Google Nexus One which has only 192MB of internal storage space available for apps.

Mozilla has changed the name of its pre-release version of Firefox Mobile from Fennec 2.0 to Fennec 4.0. What’s in a name? Not much, really. The update doesn’t add any new features. It’s just Mozilla’s way of helping make it clear that the mobile version of Firefox is being developed in parallel with the desktop version — and the next major version of Firefox for the desktop will be Firefox 4.0.

With that in mind, when Mozilla is ready to drop the Fennec codename, the browser will be called Firefox 4 for Android and the Nokia N900.

If you’ve been beta testing Fennec, any browser add-ons that work with Fennece 2.0b1pre will work with Fennec 4.01b1pre.

The latest nightly builds of Firefox Mobile are available from the Mozilla FTP site.

via Android Central