Mozilla’s uploaded a new and updated version of its Firefox Beta 4 Android browser to the Android Market today, and has made many, many bold claims about the performance increases you’ll see in this version.
It’s more stable, it’s faster, it’s once again a slightly smaller memory hog, it’s massively faster than the standard Android browser in some specific speed tests. Here are Mozilla’s main boasts:
In response to valuable feedback from the previous beta, this release greatly enhances performance. Our recent tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser; roughly three times faster on Kraken, about twice as fast on SunSpider and slightly faster on V8. Everything from start-up time and page load time to responsiveness and panning and zooming are snappy in this release. Other advancements in this release include increasing stability, reducing installation memory usage, improving readability with zooming, and fixing some keyboard issues
And here’s the new version running on our Android 2.2 HTC Desire a few minutes ago. Looks about the same as previous betas, but does indeed feel rather snappy and feature-packed:
Save as PDF? Blimey. Read the full collection of Mozilla’s boasts about the updated Firefox 4 Beta for Android over on the Moz Blog. Or just download it yourself from the Android Market.
It’s smooth to use, the 1080p display is sharp, clear and bright, the device is extremely light and thin and therefore very pocketable and portable — much more so than other 5-inch phones we’ve used. And yet… we’re a bit unimpressed by the overall package…
A relatively high-spec smartphone, with a 4.5″ display running at 480 x 854 resolution and powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, plus the Ascend G510 arrives running Android 4.1.1 — albeit potentially hindered by Huawei only sticking 512MB of RAM inside it..
The Panasonic Eluga marks the company’s return to the European mobile phone scene years after several years of absence, and it’s come back to us with a moderately high-spec Android model that features a rather stylish, slim case.
Sony returns with an all-new mobile design for 2012, pairing a dual-core processor with a 720p display. It’s a lovely phone, but is it enough to end our Samsung and HTC obsession?
LG’s updated Prada phone comes with an absolutely crazy black & white theme, but is it just for fashionable suit wearers who want to make themselves look a bit more interesting?
Mark G
/ February 1, 2011Buy still a quarter of the speed of opera mobile and twice the size.
Matt S
/ February 2, 2011Do you mean opera mini? That’s because the processing is done by operas servers and massive cache store. It’s unfair to compare.
MarkG
/ February 2, 2011No Opera Mobile. It has hardware acceleration, and benefits from Operas scalable rendering engine that scales up, rather than Firefox’s cut down option.
Although I do have Mini installed too, when I am abroad to make the most of my data allowance, I use Opera Mobile all the time usually.
It’s a shame the two products can’t be combined into the same app, in different modes, as they clearly work very differently.
googly
/ February 2, 2011Riiiiiight, more like 5 times slower in general use than the 2.2 browser on the Galaxy S, which isn’t exactly super fast…
MarkG
/ February 2, 2011Hey since when have press releases actually needed to be accurate?
Mozilla are learning from the Masters themselves, Microsoft. When Microsoft say they sold 8Million Kinect units, that can mean anywhere from 1 to 8m units.
edhe
/ February 2, 2011Not sure what MS Kinect has to do with this but they counted millions of kinects out into people’s hands until it went past 3.
Don’t think they felt required to clarify further but aaron greenberg’s conversation with cliff bleszinski on twitter stated that they’d shipped 8m into the channel and that the channel was empty.
Bottom line is that they beat their estimates and the track out to consumers now is a bit pointless.
Sparky
/ February 2, 2011Not very good feedback on Android Market. I see it’s 13MB of internal storage I don’t have !!