14 DAY TRIAL // Just as promised, Mozilla made available a new beta flavor of Firefox for Android, which accompanies the availability of new releases in the Aurora and official channels as well.
This is the first beta flavor of Firefox 6.0 for Android, in line with the desktop release of the browser, expected to move to the official channel in about one month.
For those out of the loop, we should note that Mozilla announced not too long ago the adoption of a rapid release system for the browser, the same as for the desktop flavor of the application.
Last month, the company pushed the final flavor of Firefox 5 for Android into the wild, and now it is working both on Firefox 6, now in beta, as well as on Firefox 7 for the platform, which landed in the Aurora channel yesterday.
The new beta iteration of Firefox for Android comes with various new features and enhancements, including faster start up and less memory use. Users will get to the home page faster than before, and they will enjoy various browser features through side panels.
The browser also comes with higher-quality image scaling smoother zooming, less pixelation, better integration of Form Assistant, and optimizations for the larger screens of tablet PCs. The browser also comes with optimized rendering of pages that use RTL layout.
Owners of devices powered by Android 2.3 Gingerbread will enjoy a new look for the browser, Mozilla explains.
Other improvements and fixes packed with the new release include:
- Touch Events (part 1 - single touch only): Expose touch events to content for better interaction with web pages and services, and improved compatibility with existing web content. - IndexedDB database storage for web pages - Better performance and improved memory management - Automatic text hyphenation with the -moz-hyphens CSS property (see bug 253317) - Move Find In Page, Share Page, and Save As PDF to app menu on Android (see bug 612193) - Implement the W3C DeviceOrientation Event Specification (see bug 615597) - Selecting 'Tabs from other computers' on home screen directs to Preferences (see bug 639711) - WebGL textures broken when decode-on-draw is enabled (see bug 647802) - Tweaks to Firefox Gingerbread UI (see bug 659447) - Update Gingerbread UI for Preferences/Downloads/Addons and Context Menu (see bug 659457) - Tweak selection color in Gingerbread theme (see bug 660632) - [Java][SwiftKey] StringIndexOutOfBoundsException in String.substring() via GeckoInputConnection.getExtractedText (see bug 663445). Currently, Android users can enjoy a number of no less than 160 add-ons for Firefox for mobile, with more of them expected to become available in the near future.
You can download the Firefox Mobile (Fennec) 5.0 / 6.0 Beta 1 / 7.0 Aurora from Softpedia as well, via this link.