Firefox 4 for Android Greeted With Cheers and Jeers

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It looks like there are mixed reviews for Mozilla’s Firefox 4 beta 1 for Android phones. Anyone here using it?

Mozilla's release of Firefox 4 Beta 1 for Android (and Maemo) phones brought with it some cheers -- and some jeers. Though Firefox 4 Beta 1 showed improvements in some areas, it stumbled in others, leaving users yearning for speedy future enhancements.
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Yeah what he said,

Running it on my droidx, its better than the recently released alpha fennec, has some usability over the stock android browser and other good ones like dolphin and skyfire, but also is losing in several areas. No flash like the stock browser, hardocp loads bout 30 secs on my iphone 3gs and 45 sec on stock andoid(w/ flash loaded) browser on wifi, firefox on my DX takes 3x as long. Its still really slow, and resource intensive, it gets real laggy and stuttery at times. Not all gloom though, it integrates with firefox sync very well, and has the second best smart zoom of all mobile browsers Ive used (iphone still way better).
 
Is it as bloaty as the normal computer browser? I dont understand why people use firefox, it's so...4chan...
 
What part of the words "BETA 1" makes people think it should anywhere near function complete or speed optimized?
 
The size of the download was also a problem. Installation uses roughly 40MB of storage space (though Mozilla plans on reducing this to 20MB or less), and the first time it starts, it unpacks another 14MB
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thats freakin way too much even if its an alpha release, they`ll never be able to get it down to an acceptable size... :mad:
 
I will never give up my Xscope! The developer recently updated to Xscope 6, but I hated it. Luckily, he put up the old paid version for free on the webpage (xscope.net).
 
I played with it some last night. I agree with previous posts that this is very much beta software. I went back to the regular Droid X browser and will stay there until the next beta, when I shall try again.

I've never been a big Firefox fan, but I'll test anything... You never know what you may like.

On the desktop, Chrome is my browser of choice. I thought I would like IE9, but I always come back to Chrome.
 
archalien said:
Yeah what he said,

Running it on my droidx, its better than the recently released alpha fennec, has some usability over the stock android browser and other good ones like dolphin and skyfire, but also is losing in several areas. No flash like the stock browser, hardocp loads bout 30 secs on my iphone 3gs and 45 sec on stock andoid(w/ flash loaded) browser on wifi, firefox on my DX takes 3x as long. Its still really slow, and resource intensive, it gets real laggy and stuttery at times. Not all gloom though, it integrates with firefox sync very well, and has the second best smart zoom of all mobile browsers Ive used (iphone still way better).
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HardOCP takes 45 seconds to load on your stock Android? I have Flash set to "OnDemand" but it takes less than 5 seconds to load www.hardocp.com on my Nexus One using the stock browser.
 
archalien said:
. No flash like the stock browser, hardocp loads bout 30 secs on my iphone 3gs and 45 sec on stock andoid(w/ flash loaded)
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Wait, what?

HardOCP loads in less than 5 seconds on my Droid Incredible in the stock browser with 2 signal bars on 3G. On wifi it's more like three.

FOURTY FIVE SECONDS? Something's wrong with your phone.
 
Yeah I saw this news on other websites, and I felt really bad for the developers. Nobody says "thanks for your work", just a bunch of complaints that the free software beta is "not good enough".
Maybe my n900 (maemo) is better than your android phones (FOR THIS APPLICATION)because I just loaded hardocp.com in 10 seconds over 3G. It is only running at 805mhz.
Anyways, I don't care if it DOES take a minute to load. The point is supposed to be that they're making a browser that can do stuff that others can't. I can run adblock, sync, and probably some other plugins too.
 
I'll look forward to the final build on Maemo / MeeGo. Fennec/Firefox3 on Maemo5, running on my Nokia N900 is the BEST mobile browsing experience I've had to date. Adblock? Done. Sync? There! Tabs? You've got em! Hell, you can even send your browser to the background and multitask!

I'm glad this browser is coming to Android users too, though a small part of me likes it being the "draw" to Maemo/MeeGo. Firefox 4 on Windows/Linux is the best browser I've seen to date, with the speed of Chrome with all the features, open-source love and respect for privacy we've come to expect of Mozilla. If they can replicate this on mobile, that will be a MAJOR feat.
 
Doesn't work for me. I have Froyo on my G1, and as soon as I start FireFox, it then closes.
 
Tried it.. pretty unusable. Slow, awkward, fiddly zoom (sometimes it jumps to a completely different part of the page after zooming in), keeps zooming out to full page view every time you tap a link. It does some kind of "cheating" when zooming in - first it displays everything at a crappy resolution, then it gradually comes into focus. It's also significantly slower than the stock HTC customized browser on my phone.

I do use Firefox on my desktop PC. It may not be the fastest, but I'm used to it and depend on certain addons. With quad core and plenty of RAM, efficiency doesn't really matter. On a phone, it does.
 
computerpro3 said:
Wait, what?

HardOCP loads in less than 5 seconds on my Droid Incredible in the stock browser with 2 signal bars on 3G. On wifi it's more like three.

FOURTY FIVE SECONDS? Something's wrong with your phone.
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My bad, problem with brain, not phone.
I meant un-cached engadget.com not hardocp.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Is it as bloaty as the normal computer browser? I dont understand why people use firefox, it's so...4chan...
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Because your definition of "bloat" is my definition of "totally awesome features that I refuse to browse without".

Just saying.

Also, Chrome is unstable and Opera refuses to let me fix it's default settings.
 
I'll try it out, might even keep it if it's usuable.

As far as the file size, who gives a shit? That's what an SD card is for....if you have an Android phone without an SD card, then you just plain suck.
 
BigBeef said:
I'll try it out, might even keep it if it's usuable.

As far as the file size, who gives a shit? That's what an SD card is for....if you have an Android phone without an SD card, then you just plain suck.
Click to expand...

It's a pretty big deal for users of older phones with less internal storage. The HTC Desire only has about 148MB usable to apps, and I tend to have 10MB free at any time. The app first wanted to install to the internal memory of the phone, before it would allow me to move it to the SD card. I had to remove lots of stuff to make room for the ~30MBs. Even after moving it to the SD card, a large chunk (17.5MB) remained on internal storage.
 
BigBeef said:
I'll try it out, might even keep it if it's usuable.

As far as the file size, who gives a shit? That's what an SD card is for....if you have an Android phone without an SD card, then you just plain suck.
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I give a shit, though I have an SD card in my Milestone. ;)
For Apps2SD you must have at least Android 2.2 or an equivalent Rom/Mod installed .
And guess what, 2.2 isnt available for every Android phone.
 
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