Firefox 4 Beta For Mobile Now Faster and Sleeker

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Beta 2 of Firefox 4 for Mobile. Some notable improvements over the initial beta release include 'reduced memory usage, improved text rendering and a 60% install size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB).' Mozilla also makes mention that 'actions like panning and zooming are faster and smoother, and page load times are reduced from our previous beta. On Android 2.2, we're now around 25% faster on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark than the stock browser.' A future beta release will enable GL acceleration, which should further improve the performance of the browser."

Re:43mb to 17mb?

[kripkenstein]

That's a significant change in size. Usually when such a drastic change occurs, it means they originally included many things that weren't necessary. That leads me to believe they really didn't care about this before.

That's not the case - we both care a lot about this, and did not include unnecessary stuff. See this blog post [limpet.net], specifically the section "Installation size: Problems and solutions", for the reasons.

Basically, Firefox has some unique challenges to overcome, in that unlike other mobile browsers, it includes a complete web rendering engine (Gecko), unlike others which use the bundled WebKit. With some tricky methods (the custom linker mentioned there, and other stuff), it's now much better. You can also move a large part of it to SD now.

We're going to continue working on this - we know how much users care about it, and so do we!

Re:43mb to 17mb?

[jac89]

Its due to a quirk of NDK apps on android. Before Firefox had to unpack its libraries and effectively have them in two places. Now they link back to the original packed files, its sightly slower but thats where the space savings comes from.

Re:14mb for a mobile browser is sleek?

[h4rr4r]

I have a 16 GB SD card in my phone, why do I care about a measly 17MB?

Re:GPS? WTF? This is a browser!

[lowlymarine]

All browsers need GPS location to pass on to sites that use it, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.