Mozilla released the first native UI builds for Firefox Mobile on its Nightly channel. Nightly users will get the update next Tuesday, but the current browser version is far from being usable on some Android devices.
Mozilla recently amped up the expectations for its native UI version
of Firefox for Android. Instead of the old XUL-based UI, Mozilla has
been working on a native UI that is constructed from widgets for the
location bar and the main content window, which promise a faster app
startup, a more responsive UI as well as more efficient memory use.
(c)Mike Finkle
A huge change is Mozilla’s departure from the highly anticipated electrolysis strategy, short e10s, which constructed Firefox into a multi-process architecture. However, according to
Mozilla developer Mark Finkle, also resulted in substantial memory
issues and created performance disadvantages. So Mozilla has changed its
goals and is now running Gecko in a separate thread – and not in a
separate process.
The first Firefox for Android 11 native UI nightly builds are far
from being usable browsers and are, in their best sense, developer
software and targeted at those that either have to work with early
version browsers or are simply interested in how the next browser
generation may look like.
We first ran the builds on a Honeycomb (Android 3.0) tablet and saw
the browser in the raw. The build does not feature the recently released
lean tablet UI and was surprisingly memory hungry. Compared to the
default Android browser, which consumed somewhere between 76 and 97 MB
of memory with one open tab (google.com), and Firefox 9 Beta (tablet
UI), which ran on 71 to 92 MB, the native UI Nightly build asked for 148
to 160 MB of memory. The interface revealed plenty of rendering errors
and slightly revised tabs and benefitted, subjectively, from the
asynchronous content rendering as especially zooming appeared to be much
smoother than in the current beta. I am stressing that it appeared
to be smoother as the nightly build has a high tendency to crash and
refused to restart after a crash on Honeycomb – and required a
uninstall/reinstall after every crash.
The interface looked better on a vertical smartphone screen (Android
2.3), but lacked the slide screens to the right and left. The native UI
is simply not ready for prime time yet and I would recommend that
Nightly users remain cautious with the installation to this version at
this time, if they intend to use the browser for productive web
browsing.
Ethan McKinney in Products on November 18
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