Firefox for Android in 2013

Lucas Rocha and I gave a talk at FOSDEM over the weekend on Firefox for Android. It went ok, I think we could have rehearsed it a bit better, but it was generally well-received and surprisingly well-attended! I’m sure Lucas will have the slides up soon too. If you were unfortunate enough not to have attended FOSDEM, and doubly unfortunate that you missed our talk (guffaw), we’ll be reiterating it with a bit more detail in the London Mozilla space on February 22nd. We’ll do our best to answer any questions you have about Firefox for Android, but also anything Mozilla-related. If you’re interested in FirefoxOS, there may be a couple of phones knocking about too. Do come along, we’re looking forward to seeing you 🙂

p.s. I’ll be talking on a performance panel at EdgeConf this Saturday. Though it’s fully booked, I think tickets occasionally become available again, so might be worth keeping an eye on. They’ll be much cleverer people than me knocking about, but I’ll be doing my best to answer your platform performance related questions.

3 Replies to “Firefox for Android in 2013”

  1. “Firefox” and “performance” reminded me that I haven’t noticed anything particularly slow in firefox on android recently. Even my old torture test (a novel by peter watts that’s all in one page and used to take seconds to render on a regular basis) is now something I can scroll wildly through and barely even notice temporary low-res rendering. If this is your fault, thanks!

    1. Thanks! We’ve all been working on it – There are quite a few changes that will have had major impacts on performance in the last year. DLBI went in in Firefox 18, and should have improved our invalidation behaviour, progressive rendering updates went in at around the same time I think (I worked on this, based on the foundation that BenWa wrote) and would have improved pauses while panning. Many improvements have been made to invalidation and CSS transform efficiency since 18 too – v20 should be another big step, depending of course on what sites you visit. And more to come post-20 too 🙂

  2. Firefox performance has been really good for android and working with my documents as well as reading on the tablet has been easy. Personally, I use a Viewer Plugin for Firefox provided by GroupDocs to view my files and read old PDF e-books. It has proved to be a handy plugin for me as Firefox doesn’t slow down and I get nice rendered files to view. Now I have come across an article for creating my own add-on for Firefox using the Builder and wondering if it will affect performance or not? Seems like an easy process though! You should review it as well and tell me what do you think.

    http://groupdocs.com/blog/tech-blog/archive/2013/02/01/developing-firefox-add-ons-with-the-add-on-builder-and-sdk.html

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *