Speedy Upgrade to Firefox for Android | Hacker News Reader

Speedy Upgrade to Firefox for Android

blog.mozilla.org

77 pointsjoshsharp18 comments

For some reason Mozilla blocks it for Android 3 devices but allows it on Android 2 and Android 4. I copied the apk over and it works fine.

If anyone on the team is reading this, I also happen to have a page that renders correctly on the desktop Firefox and Chrome, plus mobile Chrome and the native Android browser, but messes up on Android Firefox (style information looks like it is getting ignored). The page however has some very personal information on it hence not using regular bug reporting.

Worse part is that the older Firefox is the best browser for Android 3. Now it cannot be found in the market anymore because the new version made it incompatible.

If they wanted to make it incompatible with 3.0, they should've released a new apk, so the tablet users could still install the old one. Android allows you to have multiple apks for different costumers [1], so no need to make the app unavailable after an upgrade.

[1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/multiple-a...

It isn't incompatible. I copied the apk over from another device and it works fine. It is something they configured in the app store.

Yep, seems they messed something up. Both the older Firefox, and the Aurora have been running just fine on my ICR Transformer Prime, but now Firefox refuses to update.

It is not a mistake. We currently don't support tablets in this release as development did not finish in time for this '1.0' style release.

Fortunately, you can test out Nightly (our developer oriented release channel) which has some tablet-optimized changes available for download at http://nightly.mozilla.org

[I'm a Mozilla QA Engineer]

Well, I guess this means I'll just stay with Aurora (which I've been using as my main browser for months)

I couldn't care less about UI changes. My tablet and my phone have virtually identical screen resolutions. The important bit is the web page itself. Anyway I worked around it by copying the apk to my tablet.

My biggest problem with using Firefox on android devices is not really it's fault - most content providers streamline and send a mobile version of a webpage when using the android browser - but virtually none of them properly detect mobile Firefox.

I suppose on a tablet it's fine but not on a 3-4 inch screen with slower connection.

Over time, hopefully this will be fixed and useragent added to the appropriate databases/triggers on more websites.

The Nightlies have a "request desktop version" which essentially spoofs Desktop Firefox. There's a phony plugin which allows you to fake other browsers, too.

(None of this helps if the mobile site is really a "WebKit-only" site)

I suppose on a tablet it's fine but not on a 3-4 inch screen with slower connection.

Just to offer a counter opinion, I never, ever enjoy being delegated to a mobile site, and detest the gimped experience sites try to force on my very capable little high resolution handset.

I guess it depends on your hardware and connection speed.

I'd rather opt-in than opt-out to the full experience on a mobile device if the main pages are full of images or bloated with many external objects.

Look at these mobile examples which I find much more suitable for tiny screens with underpowered cpus: http://www.640pixels.com/design-showcase/15-beautiful-exampl...

But most of those sites will not detect Firefox mobile (yet). Again, this is not Firefox's fault.

It would be much more appropriate to detect screen resolution and adjust the web page accordingly to ultra small or ultra large displays. I know there are already JS implementations of various flavors that allow you to detect the browsers active resolution no problem.

I would think it hilarious that anyone with the new Transformer Infinity that has a higher resolution display than their home computer or tv will be getting a giant text wall mobile site.

I wouldn't suppose WebGL is supported also?

Firefox for Android has supported WebGL for a while, yes.

Ah wonderful! Thanks!

This looks awesome. Does anyone know if SPDY support is in this release?

Yes. Firefox 11 added SPDY support (but defaulting to off), but Firefox 13 enabled SPDY by default. Firefox for Android is based on Firefox 14.

SPDY Indicator is a Firefox add-on that displays a SPDY icon in your address bar (but it doesn't support Firefox for Android yet).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-indicato...

It's fast and smooth, but the font sizes are all over the map. Especially in these HN comment threads. Some of the posts are readable, and some of them use microscopic type.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com