Firefox 5 beta in the Android Market

[Kabob]

Lets hope it's a better effort than 4.

Link

 

[CrackRabbit]

Lets hope it's a better effort than 4.

Link

FF4 for Android was by far the worst browser I have used on any platform.

Edit: Installed on my Droid1, gave me a warning that my device wasn't supported. Runs like molasses. Uninstalling now. Dolphin Browser it is.

 

[Kabob]

Yup, it's atrocious.

 

[zerogear]

Still no flash, image resize results in pixelated images :/ Only good thing was firefox sync.

 

[Deeko]

Each Firefox for Android has been just terrible. Why would they even release this nonsense?

 

[Oyeve]

Each Firefox for Android has been just terrible. Why would they even release this nonsense?

I agree. One would think that after 5 tries and no improvement one would give up.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Some things have been improved (like link detection and reformatting on zoom). The periphery interface is still tops as well.

But it's still poor performing and doesn't support flash. Meanwhile, Opera Mobile is super smooth and also supports flash. A slightly inferior interface is totally worth that.

 

[Anneka]

well it's about time. The only thing that i would hate is to see many bugs coming straight with the launch

 

[Kabob]

OK, so I've spent some time with Beta 5. I think the actual interface is pretty slick, I like the look and feel of it. The biggest issue is still the fact that it's a resource hog from hades though. Seriously, I had one tab (Google search) up and checked my memory usage, it was at 47 MB's. When I back out of it I have to restart my launcher as it's sucked up so much memory. I chatted with a Mozilla dev guy a few months ago about this issue and he chocked it up to the fact that I was still on Android 2.1. Now I'm on 2.2 and the problem persists.

Also, I HATE their search function. Like, absolutely hate it. Give me an address bar or a search bar, on my phone combining these two just doesn't work like it does on a desktop.

Tab management is alright, Dolphin is still king in that realm (especially with being able to use the volume controls to swap tabs). Lack of Flash sucks the life out of this browser.

As mentioned above, why is Mozilla wasting their money with this thing if they're only putting out a half arsed effort every time? There's just no heart here.

 

[Dulanic]

^ This. All this does is make Mozilla look bad.

 

[Ravynmagi]

I really don't see any improvement over FF4 on Android. It's still as bad as ever.

I hate the interface and it's still the same. Swiping right brings up the open tabs and swiping left brings up the some navigation controls and tools. I hate this design because I'm always opening these side menus when I don't want to.

Dolphin has a similar left/right swipe action, but in Dolphin you have the option to turn this off, helpful if you are dealing with a page that needs a lot of horizontal swiping (like google maps). But in Firefox you can't turn this behavior off.

I really love Opera's interface. No annoying side menus, everything is at the top in a compact bar.

But Firefox's worst problem is it's bloated size and slowness. It's dreadful waiting for the browser, waiting for everything. With Dolphin or Opera, I can get to the page, read an article, and wash the dog in the time it would take Firefox to launch, and load the page. Okay, it feels like it sometimes anyway.

Firefox is my favorite desktop browser. And I LOVE having my desktop bookmarks easily accessible on my phone and tablet. Also being able to see my open tabs on the desktop or laptop from my other devices is real nice too. So it's really disappointing that everything else about the browser just sucks on Android. I just can't use it in it's current condition.

Mozilla, you need to burn this, it's not salvageable. You need to start over from ground up and redo everything.