Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 for Android | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 for Android

blog.mozilla.com

128 pointsGarbage85 comments

It actually seems to flow pages better than the stock browser (Atrix running Froyo). Specifically, http://www.linux.org.ru has tab on the left in the proper position in Firefox while the stock browser puts it after the main content div.

The mobile tabs are awesome. And I really like the fact that I can get to the address bar while being half way into the page. The Awesome Bar is also, well, awesome. I thought I might not like it, coming off of an iPhone, but it actually works really well.

My only complaint so far is that spell checking does not appear to be turned on, and capitalization does not work by default. Very frustrating when trying to post comments to HN...

Set it to the default browser in a heartbeat.

By the way, I discovered there are desktop version of the mobile build available for developers (Windows, Mac and Linux)

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/

Windows http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/w...

Mac http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/m...

Linux http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/l...

Wow. I wish I could use this on my netbook but it doesn't seem to be useful for much more than testing right now. Configuration and keyboard use is pretty limited.

Really fast though.

My two favorite features:

- Tabs are actually usable.

- With Sync, you can walk away from your desktop and have your tabs (and history/bookmarks/passwords) on your phone.

(Disclaimer: I work at Mozilla, but have nothing to do with mobile.)

I want to use Sync, but I'm really concerned with the security of it. How do I know my data is safe?

Can I install a sync server on my own domain?

You can.

Source code: http://hg.mozilla.org/services/sync-server Instructions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.1/Setup

Wow, thanks. That looks a little too complicated for me, though.

Edit: Also the link seems to be outdated.

That page is reasonably up to date. Also, there's an alternate server in PHP which is easier to set up:

http://tobyelliott.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/updating-and-dep...

The PHP "minimal" server is going away in the future, as the Python server becomes better-supported and easier to set up. For now, however, the minimal server is usable and current; the latest version was released just last week.

That's not what you should use (though it's what is currently used in production at Mozilla). There's a reimplementation in Python; the README: http://hg.mozilla.org/services/server-full/file/db2d0dbc0a79...

(The Python implementation will eventually replace the PHP implementation in production as well.)

Data is encrypted client-side, so even Mozilla can't read it. If someone hacks Mozilla, they could get your encrypted data, but without your passphrase, they won't be able to read it. On the downside, if you forget your passphrase, you won't be able to read your data either (you have to wipe your account and start over).

Are you sure? According to this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.1/Setup it says the passphrase you use is sent in the clear (over HTTPS) to mozilla every time you get the data. That implies that while the data may be stored encrypted client-side, it's decrypted or at least verified server-side.

That is an old page, back when it was a labs project called Weave.

Try this: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-firefox-sync#w_what...

There is absolutely no way for Mozilla to get your data, even if subpoenaed. And, if for some reason you still don't trust it, you can easily set it up on your own server.

Okay, how do I set it up on my own server? If that link is old, where's the updated one?

>>There is absolutely no way for Mozilla to get your data, even if subpoenaed

There needs to be more assurances like this in the world.

The encryption key and the password are two separate tokens. The password is supplied by the user, while the encryption key is a randomly-generated 26-character string. (In some earlier versions of Firefox Sync, the key was also supplied by the user and was called a "secret phrase.")

The password is sent to the server, but the encryption key is not. For more info, see: https://support.mozilla.com/kb/where-can-i-find-my-firefox-s...

>- Tabs are actually usable.

What does that mean exactly?

That tabs generally aren't on smart phones?

Are you trying to be difficult or have a laugh at my expense or does anyone actually have any real complaints about how tabs are handled in the stock Android browser or say by one of the very popular Dolphin variants?

I don't understand why these tabs are better than the tabs in the normal browser. Let me guess, everyone thinks you have to scroll up to get to see the tabs? Too bad.

I do. It takes too many clicks to get at the other windows with the (my?) default Android browser, and at any rate I can only have, what, 7 "tabs" open at a time? As often as not I get errors when clicking on links in email/rss that I have the maximum number of windows open, which is a drag. I've been trying Opera over the past week or two, but that doesn't have any controls for modal popups (among other issues).

Try Dolphin Mini

Mobile Firefox lets you switch between tabs by pulling out a sidebar on the left side of the screen, so you can access them quickly, and you can see the current page and the tab list at the same time: http://support.mozilla.com/kb/how-do-i-use-tabs-mobile

Like xscope?

To be fair, didn't xscope copy that from earlier versions of Firefox Mobile?

Yup, Firefox Mobile has been using this same tab UI since our first alpha versions on the Nokia Maemo platform in 2008.

Does contentEditable/designMode work on it by any chance?

If so, it will be the first mobile browser to support it.

Basic test here: http://html5demos.com/contenteditable

or much more advanced here: http://ckeditor.com/demo

Just tried it. It does!

Wow this is huge news!

Others might not appreciate it but that means it's the first mobile browser that rich, WYSIWYG editors like CKEditor and TinyMCE will finally work!

(iPhone and native Android do NOT support contentEditable despite being a webkit branch)

This is history repeating itself where Mozilla/Firefox competition will force other browsers to finally improve their game.

When did that happen the first time? As I recall, Chrome started the second browser wars, which even caused IE to try again. FF was unable to do that.

Microsoft didn't even have anyone working on IE for most of the five years between IE6 and IE7 (2001 - 2006). Without competitors like Firefox to keep web standards and cross-browser compatibility alive through that era, it would have taken a lot longer to dig ourselves out of the IE6 era.

(Remember when IE had 90% market share, and web developers routinely wrote IE-only code?)

Remember when mozilla blew so badly that IE6 was the best browser around? Firefox wasn't even around for most of the 2001-2006 era, until somebody finally decided the mozilla all in wonder mega suite was a crime against nature.

Sure, firefox keeps IE in line, but mozilla also has a history of jumping the tracks without strong competition.

Its certainly true that statistics work best when you make them up.

The first version of firefox was in 2002, and was already better than IE: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/phoenix/releases/0.1/

But IE7 wasn't much of an upgrade over IE6. Neither was IE8. Browsers didn't take the next step until Google got fed up with javascript rendering speeds and took it into their own hands; now every browser is fast.

Firefox AND Opera made the web bearable in the years between IE6 and Chrome, but they hardly are responsible for the arms race that is taking place now.

IE8 is a huge upgrade over IE6. For one thing, at ship time it implemented the entirety of the then-current CSS 2.1 draft Just comparing it to IE7, it added generated content, automatic counters and quotes, tons of fixes to floats, outlines, lots of box model bugfixes. the list goes on and on. It's not a huge upgrade in terms of _Javascript_, but in terms of CSS it's light and day when you compare to IE6. Oh, and IE8 moved to a process-per-tab model.

The thing I think you're missing in the evolution of IE after the team was disbanded post-IE6 is that it takes time to build up a project team from 0 to hundreds of people, especially when the codebase is preexisting and large. IE7 was them starting to put a team together again, doing catchup on obvious UI features like tabbed browsing. IE8 was them finally having enough people to execute well on some things (CSS 2.1, process-per-tab) and try to play catchup on other things (JavaScript performance). IE9 is them having a team big enough to work on all parts of the browser at once.

You also have your history slightly wrong on the JS perf. Chrome was first announced on September 1, 2008; before that some people knew that Google was working on a browser, but the details were secret. The WebKit project initially landed the SquirrelFish Extreme jit on September 18, 2008; it's pretty clear that this was in the works before Chrome's existence was announced. Mozilla landed the initial Tracemonkey implementation in their main development tree in mid-August 2008 (weeks before Chrome was announced), and had been working on it for some time before that. So all three (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) were working on JITs in parallel before Chrome was announced; it's not like Chrome shipped a JIT and everyone else suddenly decided they had to do it as well. Had Chrome never existed, Firefox and Safari (and Opera, which joined in on the game in early 2009) would still have competed for faster javascript; IE9 would still have ended up doing a jit, or risking being left in the dust.

Oh, and the Sunspider benchmark, for example, was first released in December 2007, when both WebKit and Mozilla were actively working on their interpreters' performance and starting to work on the JITs they'd have by September 2008. Again, the competition for faster JavaScript was very much in play already.

Now Chrome has contributed to the competition, as have all the other players. But they sure didn't start it.

"The WebKit project initially landed the SquirrelFish Extreme jit on September 18, 2008; it's pretty clear that this was in the works before Chrome's existence was announced."

In fact, the Apple WebKit folks have said that they began the Squirrelfish Extreme project the day after Tracemonkey was announced. It was quite an engineering accomplishment to have an initial stab at a JIT in a month and have it shipped to users in a few more, especially considering it took Mozilla about a year (Summer '08 - June '08) to ship theirs. And everyone knew about Tamarin's development over the previous couple years - so it ended up being a really amazing coincidence that all three JITs were announced within a one month period.

The fun fact is that contentEditable/designMode was first introduced in IE 5.5.

http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable

I've been using the beta for a month or so, and it's miles better than the stock Android browser. Notable features:

- supports <video> and <audio>

- fixed-size divs (used for multiple scrollable page sections) work properly

- Pages are rendered practically identically to desktop Firefox/Chrome; the Android browser sometimes does weird things to pages with complex CSS.

While I haven't noticed any improvements in page rendering speed, but the browser UI itself is more responsive.

It also supports using the accelerometer in javascript! http://karlwestin.posterous.com/javascript-accelerometer-on-...

Does anyone know what the hardware requirements are? The market will let me install it on a samsung galaxy but not an lg optimus. Is it the cpu speed of the optimus or something else? I can't seem to find a list of requirements anywhere.

EDIT: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Req...

It is the CPU generation. "Release builds of Firefox require a phone with an ARMv7 processor" and the Optimus has an ARMv6.

Is anyone from mozilla or otherwise familiar with how badly it would run if I built it myself with a v6 target?

Hi, I'm a member of the mobile Firefox team at Mozilla.

Building for ARMv7-only lets us use the Thumb-2 instruction set, which results in code that is smaller, faster, and uses less memory.

We used to have ARMv6 builds available, but at this point the browser is not really optimized enough to run well on older (or low-end) devices. And since we were not actively testing or supporting those builds, the code now has some crashing bugs (probably related to the JavaScript JIT) that show up only on ARMv6 builds. Without fixing those bugs, you can't actually run Firefox on ARMv6.

We continue to reduce memory and CPU usage, and if it it gets good enough to support these devices then we might start working on it for a future version.

Thanks very much for the straight dope!

The benchmark numbers seem great, but actual browsing perf doesn't seem any better if not worse than the stock Nexus S browser. Just curious if Mozilla spends a lot of time optimizing benchmarks or the top 1000 sites?

I'm just having trouble reconciling their incredible benchmark numbers with how it feels to simply browse the web.

They've been working on a variety of performance indicators:

http://blog.lassey.us/2011/03/29/mobile-firefox-performance-...

Yeah, that's the page I had read and was expecting perf that killed the Nexus S stock browser. But I'm not sure if its any better. Do you see better perf on your device? Are there some pages that show the perf delta more than others (besides Mozilla built showcase pages?).

Right now, the only big speed advantage is in processor-intensive JavaScript. You can see this in any JS-intensive application. For example, run the performance tests here in Firefox vs. stock Android browser: http://lookups.pageforest.com/test/perf-test.html

(These performance tests are based on a JS library to do efficient dictionary lookups; more info at https://github.com/mckoss/lookups)

In other areas, like startup speed, we know that Firefox for Android is still catching up to other browsers. It's improved a lot over the last year, and we'll keep on improving it.

oh a Saviour has come. Adblock plus for mobile. This is the one killer tool i have been waiting for.

If you have a rooted phone, you can always use AdFree. It adds entries to your /etc/hosts so it blocks ads in all apps.

Thanks, i will try it out. I am actually ok with most ads on apps, i dont find them as intrusive, the browser on the other hand is a nightmare.

Dolphin HD may not be free, but it has supported ad-blocking for a long time trough extensions.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I trust closed-source browsers from China about as far as I can throw them. I'll be sticking with Moz.

It's great to have another credible browser for Android and Firefox 4 kinda works OK on my Xoom but there are two issues that make me hesitant to use it - Fonts - there is some "non-nativeness" there - they look blurry and - Heaviness - the native browser on the Xoom is just insanely light and fast (couple crashes everyday aside) but Firefox feels heavier to use. Part of that might be drawing, part may be slow startup and some just general UI element sizes.

Kind of a bummer that they require an ARMv7 processor - won't install on lower-end but still very decent models like LG Optimus S/V.

I have a HTC. Does it uses an ARMv7 ?

See the list at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Req...

Can somebody find a direct download link for the .apk file? I tried using the Mozilla website but ended up in eternal redirection and flashy pages. I really do not want to waste 14MB (!) of my precious bandwidth on a browser installation. That would be 5% of my monthly bandwidth.

You can download the APK directly from here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/4.0/a...

You can also search for "Firefox" in the Android Market on your phone (connect to WiFi if possible, if you want avoid cellular data charges).

(By the way, if you literally ended up in a redirect loop, please let me know so we can fix it.)

Thank you!

No "HTTP redirect", I meant navigational/logical/mentally.

Here's an easier url (goes to the same .apk): http://j.mp/firedroid

Anyone else having user-agent issues? Google reader, for example, shows up as what looks like the dumb phone mobile site, not the smart phone mobile site (which is great) or the desktop site. And I can't find a setting to change the user-agent.

This add-on will let you change the user agent: https://addons.mozilla.org/mobile/addon/phony/

For Google Reader, you don't need to change the useragent; you can just go to http://www.google.com/reader/i/

Reader works well in Firefox, but many of Google's mobile sites use WebKit-specific markup, and will not work correctly in Firefox if you change the user-agent header to iPhone or Android.

I downloaded the browser and installed 3 small extensions. It asked to "Restart", which I assumed meant the application. Instead it reboot the phone.

After that, it just hung on the Loading screen sucking up 100% CPU. I searched to see if I could manually delete the extensions, but they aren't saved on the SD card from what I could find, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the application and now it actually loads.

They really need to put some safeguards in place to make sure extensions don't crash the browser like that. Having to uninstall and reinstall just to remove a bad extension is really problematic.

I assume that add-ons need to be written specifically for the Android browser - no delicious add-on listed, will need to stick with Dolphin HD for now.

This is awesome news..just trying it out. Minor quibble why is the installer a Huge 14 Mb in Size? On a desktop FF4 is a 12Mb download so what gives?

On Android, we ship all the locales in one package (since the Android Market doesn't have a simple way for us to deliver different packages to different locales). That accounts for part of the difference in size.

We're working on various ways to reduce the size, including moving the locale files into separate files that are downloaded at installation time.

Thank you for the answer. Please implement this quickly, I want to recommend FF to pretty much everybody and a huge honkin download is not a good sign on a mobile phone.

Can anyone compare it to the Dolphin browser?

i second this

I switched from the last beta to Dolphin some months ago because (iirc):

Firefox did not support gestures. It was very slow to start. It did not reflow text (properly or at all?).

At least the reflow seems to be included now so I guess I try again.

edit: Installed it. Tried zooming in on reddit, hn and metafilter. Failed to reflow on all of them. Reflowing after zoom is enabled in the options, at least I think it is (the stupid apple slider shows the yes in blue, I guess that means it is on. Or does it switch on if I press it? I never got the design of those buttons.)

Apparently no way to exit the application.

Takes guesstimated 10 seconds to cold-start. 3s for Dolphin.

Yeah, those buttons always bugged me... the design could have been a lot cleaner.

I'm not sure if Firefox Mobile has the same support for theming that the desktop does, but if so I imagine they'll be some nice themes for it eventually. :)

No text reflow and no text selection turn the web into a giant set of PDFs. Tab mechanism is cool. Otherwise disappointing. Uninstalled.

There's a text reflow option in the preferences.

I saw it and activated it, without any tangible effect. And reflow is probably the single most useful feature of a mobile browser.

Reflow currently takes effect only when you double-tap, not when you pinch zoom (just like some versions of the stock Android browser). The reflow is still a work in progress, which is why it's disabled by default - we have some improvements planned for future versions.

I have no idea why nobody mentions that copy&paste in forms isn't implemented.

It's of little use for me without that.

That's because copy/paste in web forms is implemented. It was fixed after beta 5, but before release candidate 1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611741

Less powerful hardware does not seem like the best place for Firefox.

There are plenty of Android devices that have dual core CPUs with more RAM and storage than most netbooks. Just because we still call them "phones" for some reason doesn't mean they aren't pretty powerful.

Independent test by people like Microsoft and Cnet seem to indicate that Firefox is doing well with resource usage. What makes you think otherwise?:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/28/browser-power-...

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20047314-12.html

Microsoft is an independent source? What?

I thought he just said 'independent test' and not that MS was an independent source?

They are independent of mozilla and the people who make firefox.

You obviously haven't used Firefox 4.

It works as fast as any of the other browsers on my Galaxy Tab.

A couple of open tabs on moderately complex web pages (no web apps though) runs it at around 75 MB on my phone. Seems perfectly snappy on the Atrix, but I don't know about older devices.

Damn, I need 512MB RAM for a browser. Feels so bad.

How does it compare to Safari on iPhone?

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