14 DAY TRIAL // During the past few months, Mozilla has been hard at work with the delivery of a new experience for mobile users who take advantage of Firefox for accessing the web while on the go. The new Firefox for Android 9 is here to bring forth all of these long expected changes.
According to the company, users can now benefit from a redesigned experience on their Android tablet PCs and smartphones, which should translate into a more intuitive mobile browsing.
At the same time, the new browser release brings along a new set of tools for developers who would like to come up with interactive mobile Web experiences.
“Firefox for Android leverages large tablet screen sizes and optimizes popular features for tablets,” Mozilla explains.
“The Awesome Screen integrates Firefox Sync and makes it easy to access your browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks and saved passwords across desktop and mobile devices so you can type less and browse more.”
In the new app release, tabs can be seen in the left panel as thumbnails, offering users the possibility to easily switch from one to another while being able to continue viewing the full website in the right side of the screen. For a full-screen view, you can simply swipe to the left to hide tabs.
“Firefox optimizes your Web experience for both portrait and widescreen mode. In portrait mode, tabs are listed in a top left menu and easily hide when you don’t need them, allowing you to focus on the websites you visit,” the company continues.
The new Action Bar menu available next to the Awesome Bar provides fast access to Firefox Preferences, Add-ons, and downloads. Moreover, there are back, forward and bookmark buttons on the Action Bar, and users can also add favorite sites to the homescreen via one-touch bookmarks.
For developers, the new version of Firefox brings new HTML5 tools aimed at enabling then to easily come up with fun and interactive mobile Web experiences. They can take advantage of HTML5 Input Tag for Camera Access to build apps and sites that can put the camera on devices to good use.
Not to mention that Firefox for Android arrives with support for HTML5 Form Validation API, which is aimed at automatically validating website form fields so that devs won’t have to use custom code or third-party libraries.
You can find the latest version of Firefox for Android available for download from Softpedia via this link. The Beta and Aurora versions of Firefox are available there as well.
