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.
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...) 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).
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 :).
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.
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.
reading hacker news is a pain with that browser. but to be honest, HN is one of worst 'simple' design sites that i've ever seen. i have no idea how but it breaks zoom on most browsers and makes moving the cursor inside the text area painfull.
firefox will refuse to adjust text size. and trying to zoom will click all links under my fingers... just too weird
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'.
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.
For everyone with an incompatible ARMv6 device: I installed the last Nightly Build from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/tinderbox-buil... on my ZTE Blade with Custom ICS and haven't run into any troubles yet. It feels quite sleek, well done Mozilla!
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.
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.
This is very much a "1.0" release of the new UI; we definitely have a lot of polish and features to add still. For the first release our focus was on getting the fundamental UI and performance work done. The nightly builds from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ are much more polished already.
The nightly tab interface is a lot better, with the tab close buttons on the right. Previously with the tab expander button in the top right and the close buttons on the left edge, closing tabs meant reaching all the way from one corner to the other side of the screen, which is not always easy or possible with a single finger.
I think you should definitely pursue tweaks that reduce the amount of finger movement required to do common tasks. Just to steal one example from Opera, when you long-press a link, the context menu appears directly under your fingers, so you don't have to go anywhere to get to it (similar to the right-click menu on the desktop). This is incredibly convenient, because navigating the context menu doesn't cause you to lose your place on the page.
I'm hoping for something like the stock browser's quick controls myself. I find them much easier to use quickly, and even a little bit of extra screen space is nice to have on a phone.
This is great. Keep up the fantastic work! The FF mobile team deserves a lot of kudos for the way they've been able to fight their way back onto Android. I remember it was kludgy beyond belief as much as 6 months ago. But since then, it has improved massively with each release.
I love Chrome on Android, but for some reason it feels more "chunky" than the stock browser, which is completely different to how Chrome feels compared to Firefox and IE on the desktop. I still use the stock browser, mainly for the Flash support, but also because it just feels lighter and quicker to use.
Given a couple more months in development and some speeding up and I'd be happy for Chrome to replace the stock browser, as long as Flash support is added. All those that call for its demise still don't realise how useful it still is on certain sites.
Google stopped innovating the "Browser" for legacy versions of their operating system. Just like Microsoft. However, the Marketshare of legacy Android is still huge, all stuck with the old "Browser".
Chrome only supports ICS, which accounts for only about 7% of Android devices. Firefox for Mobile supports Froyo (Android 2.2) and above, which accounts for about 87% of Android devices.
The disappointment is that you can't do the same for WebViews inside an app- I like to make apps using HTML5, and it would be very easy to make cross-platform ones if the Android built-in browser was any good. Sadly, it's not, and I don't have any means to embed a Firefox WebView.
I think the problem is that in all versions of Android the stock browser is distributed with the OS. It's not an installed application that can be upgraded independently. As I recall Google went through some pain to separate the GMail app from the OS so that it could be updated on its own schedule, and the pace of innovation in that app has increased.
I would have liked to see them do the same for the browser app a long time ago, but in a way having Chrome as a separate app achieves the same goal going forward if it becomes the default.
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?
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. :)
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's interesting. I used the default Android browser for like 2 minutes and I'm glad it will be gone. However, this will probably make it harder for Opera and Mozilla to compete. The next logical step for them would probably be to work with vendors (or at least mobile carriers) to have their browser installed by default. Opera used to do this with older phones, never saw it with Android (that does not mean it doesn't happen though).
Google is sniffing the browser user agent and serving a different page to Firefox; the nice mobile page is restricted to WebKit browsers. We're working with Google to try to get that fixed, but ultimately it's up to them.
That's been considered, yes. In this case support for -webkit prefixed stuff would probably be needed in addition to the UA string faking. Oddly enough, Apple and Google are strongly opposed to anyone else implementing -webkit prefixed CSS properties, while at the same time evangelizing them to web developers all the time.
WebKit vendors also continue to support prefixed properties after the official process says they were supposed to drop them (while also arguing against other vendors supporting the same properties):
Firefox for Android's User-Agent String includes "Android; Mobile". If Firefox included the word "WebKit", then many websites serve -webkit prefixed CSS without including the equivalent -moz prefixed or unprefixed names.
Fixing those sorts of things would basically involve spoofing the Chrome UA string and probably implementing -webkit prefixed CSS stuff: Google is UA sniffing and sending totally different content to different browsers. The fonts are totally different, the underlines on the links are different, the images are floated in Chrome but not in Firefox, Firefox is not even getting sent the "More sources" bit, etc.
Your comment is a good illustration of why Opera and Mozilla have been thinking about implementing -webkit prefixes for stuff, precisely so they can work around servers doing this sort of sniff-and-send-different-content crap.
Google is serving different pages to Firefox and Chrome, even thought Firefox's User-Agent String includes "Android; Mobile". If you change Firefox's User-Agent String with the "Phony" add-on [1], then Google will serve the nicer looking pages.
Another problem is that many mobile sites are "Best Viewed with WebKit" sites because they rely on -webkit prefixed CSS without using the unprefixed or -moz prefixed names. Mozilla is still debating whether Firefox should map some -webkit CSS to the equivalent -moz versions.
