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Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica)
Ars technica has posted a
review of the Android version of Firefox. "One of the key
features of Firefox for Android is its support for Mozilla's
synchronization service. It works seamlessly with the desktop version of
the browser, allowing the user to access their bookmarks and other browser
data. This capability works as expected and will likely be a major draw for
existing Firefox users."
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Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 15:05 UTC (Tue) by ptman (subscriber, #57271) [Link]
Chrome for Android has sync as well, including tab sync. But I guess it's ICS+ only, whereas Firefox works on older Android releases? Google's big problems really is to get everyone on a recent Android release.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 15:35 UTC (Tue) by flammon (guest, #807) [Link]
It's my big problem too.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 15:46 UTC (Tue) by pranith (subscriber, #53092) [Link]
chrome is really a memory hog, not to mention of the multiple processes it creates. It is always running in the background even when you explicitly close it.
Compared to that firefox is pretty light. I've switched back to firefox even on the desktop just to be in sync on my mobile.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 22:11 UTC (Tue) by idupree (subscriber, #71169) [Link]
Firefox Sync makes sure that even Mozilla can't see your data. Is Google's that careful?
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 28, 2012 2:31 UTC (Thu) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
Thanks for pointing this out. Mozilla's double encryption technique on their sync was the "right way to do it", and everything about how Chromium peer pressures and ridicules you into giving them your Google account is mega-creepy.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 29, 2012 2:46 UTC (Fri) by lordsutch (guest, #53) [Link]
Chrome (Desktop at least) also supports double-encryption with a user-selected passphrase.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 28, 2012 6:56 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]
Firefox for Android supports Froyo (Android 2.2) and above, which accounts for about 87% of Android devices. Chrome for Android only supports ICS and Jelly Bean.
Plus, ARMv6 builds of Firefox are coming soon: http://armenzg.blogspot.com/2012/06/initial-automated-arm...
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 28, 2012 13:37 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> Firefox for Android supports Froyo (Android 2.2) and above, which accounts for about 87% of Android devices.
According to the latest https://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platfor..., 2.2 and above accounts for 93.9% of the Android devices which use the Android Market.
Also, when you install the Android SDK on Eclipse, it currently recommends that you target API level 8 (that is, 2.2 and above - see https://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/api-levels.html). Their new "Google Play services" API will be 2.2 and above only (see https://developers.google.com/android/google-play-service...). Google seems to be abandoning 2.1 and below.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 16:53 UTC (Tue) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link]
Opera offers sync too, in Desktop, Mini and Mobile versions.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 18:58 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
One can download the source for Opera for study/improvement/sharing where?
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 16:57 UTC (Tue) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]
Is it now possible to scroll away the address bar like the mobile versions of chrome, the native android browser and opera can do? Or to otherwise hide it?
When I last tried the mobile version of firefox, I could not find any way to get rid of the address bar and to have it on a screen that already feels to small for web navigation is simply too bad. At that time, I switched to opera. If it is now possible to make good use of the available screen estate, a second try would be nice, though.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 17:19 UTC (Tue) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]
By default, no. The address/tab bar is always visible.
However, there's an add-on that adds a 'full screen' mode which hides it. It's harder to get back to than just scrolling to the top, but if you don't switch tabs often it works well.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/full-scree...
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jul 5, 2012 18:19 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
With firefox on my galaxy nexus, the address bar disappears as soon as you scroll down at all. I have no add-ons installed.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jul 5, 2012 18:23 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
...oh, apparently it had gotten stuck on an old version at some point. Yeah, after updating the bar becomes stuck. Definitely a bit annoying.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 17:28 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
ff on android is great. afaik, only mobile browser that has adblocking. been using it for a while now and love it
Why do user agent developers hate rsync? Posted Jun 26, 2012 21:19 UTC (Tue) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
What about those who would like to use Chromium on their desktops and Firefox on Android? Would it not be simpler to just translate the History file to places.sqlite, and rsync places.sqlite and cookies.txt to the handheld? With paired Bluetooth devices, that could happen every time the devices are in range.
If only browsers could standardize on formats for these things. If I were an Android user I'd probably extend Chromium myself (if I could figure out how to build it, that is ;).
Why do user agent developers hate rsync? Posted Jun 26, 2012 21:59 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
That would break if users ever added bookmarks or cookies on the mobile device. Firefox Sync works in both directions (or N directions, since you can have an arbitrary number of devices).
Why do user agent developers hate rsync? Posted Jun 27, 2012 0:30 UTC (Wed) by khc (subscriber, #45209) [Link]
in practice, firefox sync seems to only show me open tabs from the last device. So if I have 3 devices with Sync, I can't see the tabs from the LRU device.
Why do user agent developers hate rsync? Posted Jun 28, 2012 10:27 UTC (Thu) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]
First, handling changes without a server would be challenging even for two devices. For more than that it will be conflict management hell. Second, bluetooth doesn't seem to be useful for the use case "X happens every time the devices are in range".
The service-based solution really is better in this case. I don't think there's anything that prevents Chromium from implementing the Firefox sync client.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 26, 2012 22:09 UTC (Tue) by liam (subscriber, #84133) [Link]
I love the new native ui FF. Not so much the actual interface (it being so damn fiddly with its tiny X's to close tabs instead of swiping and the stop/reload button being located in the url bar) but for its speed. It opens and loads pages really quickly. Faster than Chrome, it seems.
The biggest problem it has is it isn't very good at page formatting. In particular, tap to zoom or pinch to zoom. Tapping seems to have two levels: one, it zooms out as far as possible to show the entire page at the developers prefeffered width, or two, zooms in to a specific div until it marches the scren width. The later sometimes works depending on the html, but most often doesn't make text large enough. Pinching lets you zoom pretty arbitrarily, but treats the page simply as a canvas with no effort to reflow text. Opera is the best when it comes to formatting since it freely breaks lines and reflows text after pinching to zoom (the only browser I've seen do that). The upcoming reading mode should help but I dont want to have to change modes just to be able to read a page.
Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser (ars technica) Posted Jun 28, 2012 7:00 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]
Firefox's text scaling needs some work, but the new Reader mode is great. If you are brave, you can try it now with Nightly builds (Firefox 16) for Android. You can safely install the Nightly builds side-by-side with the official Firefox app (though your bookmarks won't be shared).
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