Mozilla has announced the availability of a new Firefox Mobile 4 beta release for Android and Maemo. The new version brings significant performance improvements, further reduces the browser's installation footprint, and introduces experimental support for reflowing text after zooming.
We tested the beta release with Android 2.2 on a Nexus One handset. The latest improvements make Firefox fully competitive on Google's mobile operating system, offering an excellent user experience and a number of compelling advantages over the platform's default Web browser.
Mozilla largely resolved the user interface performance issues in the previous beta, delivering smooth scrolling and excellent responsiveness. It managed to go a step further in this beta release with additional performance improvements. Page loading, which was quite acceptable in the previous beta, is even faster in the new build. We still get the checkerboard effect during rapid page scrolling, however, so it doesn't quite match the default Android browser on that front yet.
One area where Mozilla has jumped forward is JavaScript performance. In standard benchmarks, Firefox is now consistently beating the default Android browser. When we conducted tests with SunSpider on the Nexus One, we found that the default browser finished in 5,742ms and Firefox finished in 3,558ms. In addition to performance advantages, Firefox also offers additional features like syncing, support for a growing number of add-ons, and some of our favorite features from the desktop version of the browser such as the AwesomeBar.
One of our few major gripes with the previous beta was the lack of support for reflowing text after zooming. Mozilla has added an experimental implementation of this feature in the new beta, but it's still a work in progress. You can enable it by toggling the "Reformat text on zoom" option in the browser's settings panel. When it is enabled, double-clicking on a text block will zoom in to the optimal width for text readability and will then reformat the text wrapping so that it will fit the width.
The reflow feature works reasonably well, but it won't dynamically adjust when you pinch-zoom. We tested it on a number of our favorite websites and found that it worked adequately for our needs. It tears down the last major barrier to adoption of Firefox for day-to-day use on Android.
Although Mozilla has delivered an outstanding browsing experience, there are still some minor weaknesses in platform integration that need to be addressed. We couldn't find a way to paste text into a website form field, for example, or select page text.
Users can download the latest beta for Android or Maemo from Mozilla's official mobile site. It's also available directly through the Android Market. For more information about the beta, you can refer to Mozilla's release announcement.
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