A Few Improvements for Firefox's Android UI

The latest Firefox for Android nightly build now features a number of changes to the UI with the goals of "...keeping a clear distinction between different types of tabs; making better use of the screen real estate on different form-factors and orientations; and being more compliant with Android’s design language. ... the tabs tray is now divided into sections for each type of tab — regular, private, and remote — so that you always keep things separate and organized. Furthermore, once you select a private tab, the main toolbar becomes dark as a clear sign that you're in a different browsing mode. ... We now use a horizontal scrolling tabs tray whenever it improves our use of the screen space. This is achieved with a TwoWayView ... We've recently landed a new skin for Firefox for Android that is more aligned with Android's Holo design language. Almost all textures and gradients were replaced by flat colors giving a much lighter feel to the browser."

Re:Slow news day?

[Darkness404]

Firefox for Android was important when it was first envisioned because the default browser for Android sucked. Today the default browser is Chrome and its much, much, more usable. About the only thing I think Firefox is better than the stock Android browser (Chrome) is that you can get reliable adblock working for it, something you can't do (or at least couldn't do) with the stock browser.

Start page

[ThurstonMoore]

The start page showing the browser history was a deal breaker. Did they get rid of that?

Re:Slow news day?

[DrXym]

I would trust Firefox's sync more because the data is encrypted in the client before its sent to the server. As in, the the server has no idea what the data is that its storing. The server just facilitates key generation, storage, retrieval and synchronisation of data.

With Chrome, your sync data is governed by the Google Privacy Policy [google.com] which basically means they can plunder it any way they feel like to serve you ads.