14 DAY TRIAL // A new flavor of Firefox for Android is moving closer and closer to the first stable release, and the team behind the application promises a new user interface for it, based on Android UI widgets, along with an impressive increase in speed and great memory reductions.
The new version of the browser will offer a Native Android UI to its users, and this is the major gain that Mozilla claims for it.
The first build of the Native Firefox for Android has already made it into the nightly delivery channel, and those who would like to get a taste of the app are invited to download it and give it a try.
One thing that should be noted right from the start is that the builds in the nightly channel are not as stable as most users would like them to be, and that there are various issues affecting the overall experience with the application.
Nightly builds are being updated once a day with the latest changes, and those who will update to the November 23rd release will enjoy the new Native UI.
Apparently, the Native nightly builds are not as stable as the nightly releases of the XUL-based version of Firefox.
Some of the most important known issues with the application include:
Sync is not supported yet: Sync is also being refactored for the move to native and isn’t ready yet.
Panning and zooming have issues: Pages layout too wide for phones and zooming results in fuzzy content. These are our highest priority items and we are landing improvements everyday.
Tablet UI is not ready: We are focused on phones and the tablet UI has not caught up. Tablet UI is not a high priority for the native UI project since we can fallback to shipping the XUL-based version on tablets until we have a solid native tablet UI.
Bookmarks and History are saved to the system storage: We save bookmarks and history in the same storage that the stock Android browser uses. It provides tighter integration, but does mean the data is not locked away in a Firefox-only location. Passwords and other data are stored in a Firefox-only location.
Users still interested in getting a taste of the application will find it available for download from Softpedia as well, via this link.