back to article Firefox for Android now runs on EVEN OLDER, slower kit

The latest beta release of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox for Android browser has lower hardware requirements than earlier versions, adding millions of potential users. In a blog post announcing the new release on Friday, Mozilla said the mobile browser is now supported on devices with ARMv6 CPUs clocked as low as 600MHz, …

COMMENTS

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  1. DF118

    500MB?

    That seems... a lot.

    1. Mr Spoon

      Re: 500MB?

      Really 500MB is a minimum for comfortable usage on GB and causes a frustrating amount of app reloading on ICS, so for larger apps like FF it's not a surprising restriction.

      1. Shades
        Stop

        Re: 500MB?

        500MB RAM minimum for GB? You're kidding right? You must be running some massively bloated vendor-fiddled-with or extremely badly cooked ROM because my ageing HTC HD2 (which came with Windows Mobile 6) runs CyanogenMod 7 (GB) and every app I've thrown at it as smooth as silk... with only 400MB'ish of RAM to play with.

        1. Mr Spoon

          Re: 500MB?

          Yep you're right that came out completely wrong, I blame lack of coffee. What I should have said is that less than 512, which in most cases means 256 as far as I'm aware, will lead to a not great Gingerbread experience and a bloody awful ICS one. Specifically Cyanogenmod on the Moto Milestone. Having said that, even my Galaxy note unloads pages from the stock browser when I task switch on JB quite often and that's with a Gig of RAM.

          Spoon.

          1. DF118

            Re: 500MB?

            Yep. My GNex/CM10 is guilty of similar behaviour with its 1GB of RAM. AFAICT it even happens when there's no real need for it to be doing so.

      2. DF118
        Facepalm

        @Mr Spoon Re: 500MB?

        My mistake - I misread the article - I read it as meaning FF wants 500MB for itself (hence my comment).

  2. ElReg!comments!Pierre

    sounds good

    Support for older, less-capable kit presumably means a long-desserved pruning in the code. If that is the case all users will benefit from it: lower memory footprint, lighter CPU load etc. Potentially good...

  3. Si 1
    Coat

    "Google only started making public beta builds of Firefox"

    Is that line from the story a typo? Shirley it's Mozilla producing these betas?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    600 mhz now ?

    Oh good. I've been running it on my Orange San Francisco since last September.

  5. Tony Green
    Thumb Down

    Shame it's not very good

    I thought having FF on my Android would give me the same good experience as it does on the desktop. WRONG!

    Bad enough not being able to have it open up on the page of my choice. But the fact that it won't even let me choose what page thumbnails are displayed on its opening page but insists on choosing them itself. Apart from the fact that I reckon I know better than FF which pages I most want to go to, there are (ahem!) certain pages I don't particularly want prominently displayed on my 'phone when I use it in public...

    1. El Presidente
      Meh

      Re: Shame it's not very good

      Also missing decent bookmark management.

      Does have adblock though it's forgiven its shortcomings. For now

  6. Chris 171

    Hmmmm

    Still not Opera is it...

    Not today, likely never, thanks.

  7. mickey mouse the fith

    Its getting better

    Android firefox is a lot better than it was a few months ago, I actually quite like the ui. Its still a bit of a memory hog though and it does like crashing on certain webpages.

    Best Android browser for me is Naked Browser, its really fast n lightweight with a minamalist ui.

    Dolphin,Boat and most of the other browsers on the play store seem to snoop on your browsing habits and god knows what else (Dolphin keep getting caught snooping, issue an apology and promise not to do it again, then promptly do it again anyway) . A lot of those browsers are sending snooped data back to servers in China so i wouldnt trust them an inch.

  8. larokus

    no more mobile BYM

    Unfortunately they disabled the BLANK YOUR MONITOR + EASY READING add-on for mobile as found for the desktop browser. Fail

  9. Old Used Programmer

    Yet More Places to run this?

    Interesting.... The specs on the Raspberry Pi exceed the minimum requirements (Model B has 512MB now, and default clock is 800MHz. Most people use at least a 4GB SD card for mass storage).

    They don't usually run Android, though.

    And there are about 1 million of them out there...

    1. Andus McCoatover

      Re: Yet More Places to run this?

      Slight correction - I read yesterday there are 500,000 out there. But, it's growing...

      Can Android run on the Pi?

      1. markw:

        Re: Yet More Places to run this?

        No, right first time there are about a million...

      2. Ally 1

        Re: Yet More Places to run this?

        You may have read that Farnell has sold 500k. RS and the other smaller distis must have sold about a similar amount

        I might give FF another go. It was the first thing I installed when I got my HTC desire, which was at the time the state of the art Android phone..and the first thing deleted after shuddering along trying to load pages. I use Opera at themoment on my Razr, but that's no great shakes either. I may try naked browser mentioned above

  10. eulampios

    hopefully

    Mozilla has improved it. It was pretty slow for my little A10 tablet, while the generic Android browser is pretty fast. Anyways, at the time when I get this device to run GNU/Linux, firefox would also be nice to use.

    1. eulampios

      it is improved

      Just updated it. It got indeed faster. Good job, Mozilla!

  11. Anal Leakage

    At least someone cares about upgrading older Android handsets!

  12. Herby

    Given the requirements...

    Of FireFox in this environment, I still wonder how I could ever run a browser on my 80 Meg Quadra 840AV (it is one of the computers on my KVM switch) and have it work at all!

    Wonders of the ancient world never cease to amaze me!

    1. Richard 22

      Re: Given the requirements...

      Did that browser support javascript, video codecs, and all the other stuff people expect in a modern browser? In the ancient world, the www was just text with some simple markup for links, plus a few images. Things have changed (not necessarily for the better...)

  13. ukgnome

    It would be nice in those chaps at Google did the same with Chrome.

  14. Daniel von Asmuth
    Go

    Do androids dream of electric firefoxes?

    Maybe Linux will become a viable desktop OS when they make Firefox run on it.

  15. Suburban Inmate
    Meh

    Define "runs"

    Deus Ex "runs" on a pentium 100. (inb4 scatological humour)

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