Mozilla Releases Its First Mobile Firefox 4 Beta

Mozilla has launched its first Firefox 4 beta for mobile, presenting trial edition of the open-source browser for both Nokia Maemo and Google Android.

Like desktop Firefox 4 beta, Codenamed Fennec 2.0 for mobile uses Gecko layout engine and has the most recent Firefox Javascript engine, which includes the latest JagerMonkey extension. Tests conducted by Mozilla show that the application is "much faster" than Google browser combined with Android 2.1, and is increasingly replacing Android 2.2 browser.

"Early Firefox for Android builds were very slow compared to the stock browser", wrote Mozilla developer Matt Brubeck on a blog. "Performance is critical in a mobile browser, and our work in this area is starting to pay off. The new beta version is much speedier, and we have plans to make it even faster". He called mobile Firefox browser a "much needed" substitute to Webkit.

Like the alpha release, the beta version features a split architecture called Electrolysis, which incorporates one process for running and rendering scripts and one for user interface. However, in contrast to the alpha, the beta uses Mozilla's latest layers architecture, which is designed to speed up zooming, scrolling and animation through hardware acceleration.

Mozilla has also started working on hardware-accelerated OpenGL compositing, but the beta version doesn't have it yet.

Mozilla Firefox browser application for Maemo, which uses the same technology as Firefox 3.6, has been on the market since January, but it was not meant for Android. Mozilla hit Android for the first time in April by releasing a pre-alpha Fennec.