Firefox for Android with Native UI to Hit Beta Soon

Mozilla is working on the delivery of a new flavor of their Firefox for Android mobile browser, one that would bring along a very important feature, namely a Native UI.

The company has been working on this release for the past several months, and is readying the beta version of the browser now.

The Native UI Firefox promises increased performance capabilities when compared to what the previous releases had to offer. It will load faster and should prove overall speedier than Firefox on Android.

However, it appears that users might have to wait a bit longer before being able to get a taste of the Beta release of the browser, and of the final flavor after it.

The same as Firefox for desktop, the Android browser is part of Mozilla’s fast release approach, which means that a new release comes out every six weeks.

Features move through iterative testing in Firefox’s Nightly, Aurora and Beta channels. If it proves stable, it goes out in the final release.

Johnathan Nightingale, Sr. director of Firefox Engineering, notes that these releases can be looked at as trains.

“If testing reveals an issue, we pull the feature out for another round of review, and let it catch a later train. The trains have run on time ever since, and the results have been incredible. Firefox improvements reach our users regularly, faster than ever before,” he explains.

However, the Firefox for Android with a Native UI won’t be able to fit this release scheme. This is so mainly due to the fact that it does not pack only incremental and independent changes. Thus, it cannot fit the iterative release model.

“Building a new high-performance front end for Firefox on Android, by contrast, involves many interconnected pieces being rebuilt in tandem,” Nightingale explains.

“Right now, the engineering team is focused on building an amazing browser for Android phones, and we’ll have a beta to show you in the coming weeks.

“It might coincide with one of our regular 6 week trains, but it’s quite possible it won’t. If it doesn’t, don’t worry. It’s cool.”

As soon as the native UI is ready, the browser will re-enter the regular release schedule. For the time being, however, some extra work is needed to ensure that everything is done properly.

At the moment, Android users interested in giving the application a try can download and install the Aurora flavor of Firefox with Native UI. It is available on Softpedia via this link.