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| Fire Fox for Tablet |
Mozilla has offered a first glimpse of its Firefox for Tablets web browser.
Mozilla is expanding development of Firefox for Android with new efforts to improve its performance, lower its power consumption, adapt it for tablets--and keep the browser maker relevant in the hottest area of computing.
Firefox is the second-most widely used browser on computers, but things are different in the mobile arena. There, Firefox is at a serious disadvantage compared to mobile browsers such as Apple's Safari and Google's unbranded Android browser that are built into the operating systems.
The company described the new product as “an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet’s larger screen size,” in a blog post.
From what we can see (which is admittedly not much at this point), that seems to be a pretty good description. The tablet version has room for more UI elements, such as a row of tabs, unlike Firefox for mobile. A tab menu appears on the left side of the screen in landscape mode or on the top of the screen in portrait mode.
Theme-wise, the browser heavily borrows from Honeycomb, Android’s operating system for tablets. But you’ll still find familiar Firefox elements, including a big back button and Firefox’s signature “Awesomebar” — a URL field that also searches bookmarks, history and synched desktop activity.
When Mozilla programmer Dave Mandelin began an active discussion about what Firefox needs to run better on ARM processors, which dominate the phone and tablet market, a broad, active discussion took off. Mandelin wasn't very gentle.
"If you have a powerful device, Firefox performance is in many ways pretty good. But UI [user interface] responsiveness and memory usage seem to be in pretty bad shape," Mandelin said. "So we need to get better measurements and start improving performance in those areas, today."
And Mozilla, barred from bringing its browser to major mobile operating systems such as Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone, is moving beyond browsers, too.
"Smartphones and tablets are where the next billion people will expect their personalized experience to be available to them anytime, anywhere," Mozilla said in its vision statement that Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan published earlier this year. "To significantly affect Internet life in the future, we will have to deliver value on major OSes, whether we are allowed to ship our own browser engine or not."
Some Glimpses of Mozilla Fire Fox On Tablet..
Mozilla has still not announced a release date.
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