Mozilla Moving Forth with Firefox for Android

Internet giant Mozilla has announced ever since last year plans to deliver a mobile browser for users of an Android-based handset, and the development is moving forth, it seems. Several weeks ago, we learned that the company had started pushing out nightly builds for the solution, which still remained in a pre-alpha status.

This time around, we learn that these nightly builds are about to suffer some “rough” treatment for a couple of weeks, as the company started to push Electrolysis-related code to the Fennec front-end repository. Electrolysis is a project in which separate processes are being used by the Mozilla platform for the display of the browser UI, web content, and plugins.

“Starting today or tomorrow, nightly builds will probably be more broken than usual on all platforms, but especially Android. For most platforms this should be fixed in another a day or two, but Android builds might be increasingly broken until we start building mozilla-central (trunk) on Android. Almost all of the required patches are in mozilla-central now, so this should happen within a few weeks (or less),” Mozilla's Matt Brubeck states.

Those who already downloaded and installed a nightly build of Fennec Android Pre-Alpha are advised to stick to it for the time being. However, a new build has been made available already, which can be downloaded from here, though it requires for the already installed nightly-build to be uninstalled. The latest version of the experimental build is said to include a newer version of the multitouch zoom patch and many small fixes.

One of the main drawbacks of the experimental builds is that they might come with a series of bugs that would make things not run as smooth as expected. However, the new step in the development process shows that things are on the right track, and that Android users out there should be able to enjoy the already promised public beta flavor of the mobile browser before the end of the ongoing year.