Firefox for Android to Get New, Faster UI

Mozilla is gearing up for bringing a series of speed enhancements to its Firefox browser for Google's Android operating system.

The application is already highly popular among end users, yet it seems that there is room for better, and the Mozilla will make changes to it to improve the experience that users benefit from.

The team of developers behind the application is considering new ways of improving the startup, responsiveness and memory use.

Firefox Engineering Director Johnathan Nightingale was the one to confirm plans to have the mobile browser featuring the native Android UI while keeping the Gecko engine.

“After substantial discussion, we have decided to build future versions of Firefox on Android with a native UI instead of the current XUL implementation,” he stated in a recent post.

“Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open web, and this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible.”

With the new changes, Firefox on Android should load much faster than before, since the native UI can load at the same time as Gecko.

Moreover, the lack of a XUL based UI should result in lower memory usage, and is also expected to offer increased responsiveness, with improved panning and zooming.

Things are only starting to be shaping up, and it will still take a while before the new UI is being put in place for the mobile browser.

It is not set to arrive in the foreseeable future, but the team will certainly unveil more on the matter as soon as they have a specific release date.

“It's too early for us to determine when this work will be ready for users, but we are certain that it will not impact the versions currently on the Beta and Aurora channels,” Johnathan Nightingale stated.

“Firefox 8 and 9 will ship with the XUL UI, including the new UI for tablets, while we build the native UI,” he concluded.