Firefox 4 Beta For Mobile Now Faster and Sleeker 70
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."
43mb to 17mb? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:43mb to 17mb? (Score:4, Interesting)
> You can also move a large part of it to SD now.
That single sentence convinced me to give it another spin. Flash on my Desire is _extremely_ precious. Sure, this problem will more or less solve itself in a year or two, but when I see a _game_ gobble up 30 MiB, I truly question the developers' sanity and technical ability. It's nice that you guys are different :)
BTW: New & faster Firefox for N810? Pretty please? Or should I stop hoping to really use that beast? A clear no is better than an endless maybe.
In any case, thanks for your work :)
Re:A huge improvement, but still some major issues (Score:4, Interesting)
As a web developer I strongly disagree with the notion that a phone should include anything as specific as "Android" in the UA string. It just means every mobile-aware web developer out there needs to SPECIFICALLY cater for Android phones (otherwise there would not be a need for the string, would it?). The right way to do these kind of things is with CSS and it's 'handheld' media profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html#at-media-rule). And on top of it, don't go ape with fixed widths ;-) You can also get the screen size via client side scripting host (Javascript) if you care about such things. Most of the time, if the site has been designed well, it will work just fine on any modern Internet-enabled phone.
I think you would agree with me that polluting UA strings with specific product names is a BAD IDEA. You would say "yeah, they are already have been doing it for years with IE/Mozilla etc" but in any case, this has never been designed as a courtesy for web developers to make decisions as to what version of the site to serve. It's the last resort piece of information, in case you really need to know what browser user is running.
If you really feel strong about this, at least think about including a profile of the browser instead - like the string "mobile", not "Android". Because otherwise we would soon need "iPhone", "Symbian", "Windows CE" or whatever mobile product is on the market at a particular moment...