Firefox 4 Android beta gets stomach stapled
Now with 60% less beef
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Firefox 4 for Android has emerged from the fat farm, and it's 60 per cent less beefy.
On Thursday, Mozilla released a second Firefox 4 mobile beta for Android and Maemo, and the size of the Android install has dropped from 43MB down to 17MB. "There is still room for improvement and we’ll continue to make the install size smaller," the open sourcers said in a blog post.
But if you installed the previous beta — aka Fatfox — you can't get rid of all the fat unless you uninstall it before setting up the new beta.
Mozilla also says it has reduced memory usage, improved text rendering, made panning and zooming "faster and smoother," and lowered page-load times. On Android 2.2, the open sourcers say, the browser is about 25 per cent faster on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark than Android's bundled WebKit browser.
In the next release, Mozilla plans to add hardware acceleration to improve scrolling and zooming still further, and it will turn on HTML5 video. It's also working to "improve browser responsiveness" while the included Firefox Sync synchronizes data across your other Firefox platforms.
You can download the new beta here. ®
COMMENTS
Keep going Mozilla
When you get down to under 10MB call me. Until then keep your lardy backside away from me.
Okay, that was harsh, I'm sorry, darling. Normally I do go for curvy girls but my mobile phone just has a single bed, it's not a king size if you know what I mean. And if you consider all the other apps I like to fool around with it doesn't leave much room for you. Yes, I can be a tart too, always endulging myself, playing around for a bit and then dumping apps when I get bored.
You look good laid out on my desktop though, I won't deny you that. You've got a lovely skin and as for your add-ons - whey hey, I'm in heaven! My plug-in is so compatible with that. Even though you are a chunky chick, you do it for me on my PC! But I can't take you around with me on my mobile. It's not that I'm embarassed to be seen out with you, but there's just not much room for you at the moment. x x
I've tried the new beta
and found it still too big and slow,as well as rendering pages somewhat ugly. I've already uninstalled it, which is a shame really as I have been waiting to put Adblock plus on my phone. I actually really like the default Webkit-based browser and wouldn't see a need for mobile Firefox at all if it were not for all the damn advertising. It's slowly driving me insane given I've become used to an ad-free web on the desktop.
Firefox Mobile Bloatware v4
As a Firefox user/fan I went to install this yesterday as I liked the idea of sharing bookmarks with my phone and desktop.
It wanted 32Mb of storage space. 32Mb !!! WTF?
The Portable version on my desktop is only 20Mb. How the hell can you take something that's 20Mb, create a "mobile" version of it and end up with 32Mb?
As Gary F said, when it's under 10Mb let me know and I'll give it a try.
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