Quick Look: Firefox 4 Beta on Android

It’s here, Firefox for Android and it works great… sort of, yes I know it’s in beta right now so one can only hope it will get better right? As it is I like it quite a bit, except opening and closing can be slow. Opening or loading it is slow, slower than other browsers. Closing it though I sort of ran into another issue that I’ve never seen before. When I close it my desktop, or all of my icons are just gone for a few seconds and then they re-appear later of course. I installed it on my Samsung Galaxy S Captivate and as I said I like it a lot, especially the sync feature I now have all of my bookmarks from my desktop browser with me wherever I go! Which is just great, though they’re all out of order now.. but at least I have them. Another great feature is that it pulls the tabs and browser windows as well, you could have three different instances of FireFox running on your desktop and they’ll show up individually in the mobile browser for you to access.

Here’s some screen shots for you the browser looks fairly plain, but I haven’t added any plugins or anything like that yet though.

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You can slide the browser right or left to access settings and tabs. On the left side appears tabs, you can access them or close them, and at the bottom is the Bookmarks icon to access them.

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On the right side is Refresh, Favorite, forward and Back and the Settings access button.

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When you access the Setting screen you’ll find more icons on the right side for Add-ons, Down, Settings and Back.

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I blacked out the device name in the picture above because who knows what someone could do with it right?

When you access the Bookmarks tab you’ll find four options across the top for All Pages, Bookmarks, History and Desktop.

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Bookmarks is easy, you’ll see a folder at the top labeled Desktop Bookmarks, rather self-explanatory but here is where you’ll find all of your bookmarks from your desktop version of Firefox.

History is your browsing history on the phone.

All Pages is about 20 or 30 of the recent site you visited in your desktop browser.

Desktop shows you what you have open on your desktop, individual browsers and tabs.

I like the new browser at lot, it just needs to be a bit more quicker though at opening and closing. Not sure if the closing problem I mentioned earlier is specific to the Galaxy S Captivate or not though.. I’ll continue to use it, and will be anxiously awaiting the next version.

 

You can go check it out here: http:/.mozilla.com/2010/10/07/firefox-4-beta-for-android-and-maemo/

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