"So this genius mash-up of one of the biggest names in the web browsing, and the awesomeness of Android has to be a match made in heaven right.....?"
What i Like
- Mozilla Firefox in the palm of your hands
- UI is Clean
- Add-Ons / Features
What i don't like
- Performance / Speed
- RAM Hog
- Large file size
- No Flash Support
- Doesn't always render pages correctly
What is it?
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers, and arguably the the best for PC / Mac. It is a open source project that has been mainstream for years. What made it so popular was it speed, reliability, and the thousands of add-ons & extensions. There is just so much you can do customize the web browsing expierence to your liking. Mozilla then started work on a mobile browser codenamed fennec which was renamed to Firefox once it was out of the alpha builds. So this genius mash of one of the biggest names in the web browsing, and the awesomeness of android has to be a match made in heaven right.....?
UI
Cosmetically the browser looks nice and sleek. Swiping to the right will bring up your open windows / tabs.. Swiping to the left brings up your "back", "forward", Bookmark, and settings buttons. Clicking on a text field will cause the browser to automatically zoom in, which can be either a good or a bad thing. For the most part pinching and zooming works like it should. Text only re-renders when you double tap though, which kinda sucks because the double tap zoom doesn't always zoom in far enough. It has already been confirmed that there will be more flash support for android beyond flash player 11, it would still be nice to see it supported... HTML 5 does no justice for our flash games.
Performance
So here we are at the most important part of the review. At least in a web browser review.... So where to start?
Overall the performance is lacking, the browser is slow compared to the other big wigs on the market like dolphin and opera. There is checker boarding when punching and zooming. Pages just don't render properly. Some time it won't let you zoom at all. Once the page is loaded it shouldn't have to reload parts of pages while you are scrolling.
Stability
For the most part i haven't experienced many crashes with the browser. I do however, experience sense UI rebooting when you exit the browser which usually happens only when the system is trying to free up RAM. This leads me to believe that this app has a major resource problem.
Features
Like its bigger brother, Firefox for Android shines most in its add-ons. Though there is currently no themes or as many add-ons as the desktop version it still gives you the feel that you can really shape this browser into your own.
Usefulness
Honestly speaking the only reason why i use this browser is to access my college website (which requires, IE, Firefox, or Google Chrome). I have no use for a slow browser especially when my carriers data is slow in my area.... Your experience may be different than mine though. Its not as bad on Wi-Fi but, that is not every where.
UI - 4
Performance - 3
Stability - 3
Features - 3
Usefulness - 3
Score 16/25
64
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