14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has taken another step down the road towards the availability of a final flavor of their Firefox 4 mobile browser for Android and Maemo, with the release of the fifth beta flavor of the application.
Based on the same technology as the Firefox 4 for desktop computers, the mobile browser offers a nice range of features that many users should already be accustomed with, in addition to a series of enhancements aimed specifically for mobile phones.
Mozilla notes on its website that the new release is one of the most important steps it makes on the development of the application, even if there are not major features added in the new version of the browser.
“Based on all the great user feedback we have received, have continued to focus on making the browser faster, more stable, and more usable with this version,” the company notes.
The new flavor of the app comes with miscellaneous bug fixes, usability improvements, and optimizations, and is said to be more stable than previous releases.
When it comes to performance and memory usage, here's what the changelog shows:
- We improved startup speed even more (compared to Beta 3 and Beta 4). This was a top request from Beta 3 users. - Improved page load speed - Firefox will now move its profile data to the SD card when you move the application to the SD card on Android 2.2 or higher - Scrolling and page rendering are faster and smoother - JavaScript is faster - our benchmarks show additional performance improvement in Beta 5 compared to Beta 4. - Reducing memory and optimizing CPU usage are ongoing themes. We have been working on improvements in this area to make the browser more responsive and stable. Overall responsiveness has improved. We have identified some additional options for improvement, especially when using Firefox Sync, which we will launch soon. You will see continuous improvement in our future releases
Firefox 4 Beta can be downloaded and installed on devices running under Android 2.0 and higher, as well as on the Nokia N900. The application requires 512 MB of RAM and around 14 MB of storage. It can be installed on memory cards too.
Firefox 4 Beta 5 is available for download from Softpedia as well, via this link.