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Categories: Firefox for mobile Mozilla News

Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile is Now Faster and Sleeker

305 responses

We are happy to bring you the latest release of Firefox 4 Beta for mobile. The beta is now available for download in 10 languages on your Android or Maemo device.

We received a lot of great feedback on the previous beta and addressed many of the issues reported, including reduced memory usage, improved text rendering and a 60% install size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB). There is still room for improvement and we’ll continue to make the install size smaller. (Note: Due to some technical limitations on Android, upgrading won’t remove some of the old files that are no longer needed. Therefore, you must uninstall the previous beta before you will see the size improvements.)

A few new things you’ll see in this release include a new theme that gives Firefox a fresh new look, the ability to easily share links with your friends from the Site Menu and the ability to undo closing a tab. Learn more about the Firefox UI improvements from Madhava Enros, our Lead UX Designer.

In this release we also worked to make Firefox 4 Beta faster. Actions like panning and zooming are faster and smoother, and page load times are reduced from our previous beta. On Android 2.2, we’re now around 25% faster on the SunSpider Javascript benchmark than the stock browser.

We are working to minimize changes that affect add-on functionality. We would love to see our awesome community of add-on developers building exciting new add-ons, especially ones that consider mobile specific use cases.

We will continue to improve usability and performance in the next release. We’ll add hardware acceleration to make scrolling and zooming even faster and will enable HTML5 video to bring a more rich browsing experience to your phone. We are also working to improve browser responsiveness while Firefox Sync completes the initial sync of your data.

In this beta, there is a new “Feedback” button in the Browser Controls panel to make it easy for you to let us know what you like or dislike. While the overall stability of Firefox improved in this release, we also added easy-to-submit crash reporting, similar to how it works in desktop Firefox.

We need your help testing this beta to build the best Firefox mobile browser. Get involved with this beta release and Go Mobile.

For more information, please visit:

305 comments on “Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile is Now Faster and Sleeker”

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