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Firefox 4 Beta for Android

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  • 07-10-2010 11:23pm
    #1
    Keano
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Social & Fun Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 12,803 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    It has been released and now available to download.

    Here


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    #2
    Andrew76
    Moderators, Computer Games Moderators Posts: 10,159 Mod ✭✭✭✭Andrew76


    Shame it uses so much memory, 17MB on SD and 14MB worth of data stuck in phone memory? No thanks. xScope 6 way smaller and looks much nicer imo.


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    #3
    ct5amr2ig1nfhp
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,019 ✭✭✭ct5amr2ig1nfhp


    Jaysus... it's worse than the N900 version. Uninstalled it.


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    #4
    opus
    Registered Users Posts: 4,977 ✭✭✭opus


    Andrew76 wrote: »
    Shame it uses so much memory, 17MB on SD and 14MB worth of data stuck in phone memory? No thanks. xScope 6 way smaller and looks much nicer imo.

    Ah that would explain why I couldn't install it then. Think I'll wait for the final (& hopefully smaller) release.


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    #5
    justsomebloke
    Registered Users Posts: 10,407 ✭✭✭✭justsomebloke


    BearNecessities wrote: »
    Jaysus... it's worse than the N900 version. Uninstalled it.

    agreed, tried one site andd uninstalled it, woeful


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    #6
    gbob
    Registered Users Posts: 522 ✭✭✭gbob


    Its desperate, slow laggy poor text rendering & crashed the first link I tried. Only tried it cause I use the desktop version, but Dolphin HD is way better.


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    #7
    Professey Chin
    Registered Users Posts: 51,054 ✭✭✭✭Professey Chin


    One of the comments on the lifehacker story gives good info on its size compared to browsers like dolphin.Mainly cause it needs to use its own rendering kits unlike ones that use the webkit one
    Unlike browsers that use the stock WebKit library, Fennec must ship its rendering libraries in its APK file. Many Android phones were built with 64 MB to 512 MB of storage for apps. Users who think nothing of a 12 MB download to install Firefox or Chrome on a laptop may think twice before installing it on one of these phones! Storage space is much larger on most new phones, but this is still an issue for many users.

    Even worse, a quirk of the Android NDK means these native libraries are saved in two places – compressed inside the APK, and extracted to a folder for loading. For apps like Firefox that are mostly native code, this more than doubles the installation size. Other NDK apps like Google Earth pay the same double storage penalty.

    To solve this problem, Mozilla's Michael Wu is writing a custom dynamic linker that loads libraries from the APK without installing them to a folder. This cuts the installed size by more than half, but increases startup time slightly. For newer phones with 1 GB or more of internal storage, we might choose to let Firefox take more space but start faster. On phones with less storage, we can use the custom linker to save space.

    Firefox 4 beta 1 needs about 40 MB of storage on Android. Under Android 2.2 you can move the APK to your SD card, but the extracted libraries stay in internal storage. Beta 2 will be much smaller, and you'll be able to move more of it to SD.


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