Mozilla today announced the second beta of Firefox 4 Mobile for Android and Maemo. The software has made substantial process and is now among the most attractive browsers for Android. It scores in performance and HTML 5 compliance tests. iPhone users may be jealous.
The first Firefox 4 Mobile Beta was a rather rough release and a browser that was easily trumped by other popular Android browsers such as Dolphin. However, the second beta is a different caliber and is, according to our preliminary test run the fastest mobile browser for Android. Since it is based on Firefox 4, is offers amazing HTML 5 support, which is on par with the desktop version.
The new beta has dropped in size substantially – from more than 40 MB for the installer to about 17 MB. Mozilla says that future versions will get rid of more weight. There is a new interface that is now much more integrated with Android. Firefox Sync is now supported as well, which allows you to bring your bookmarks through the cloud to the mobile browsers.
Our quick test included a test run of Sunspider on a T-Mobile G2 phone with an 800 MHz processor. The test was completed in 5637.3 ms, which compares to 7129.5 ms of the standard Android browser and 6887.4 ms for the popular Dolphin browser. At least in theory, you can also run any HTML 5 content on this browser you would run on your desktop Firefox. The browser scores 226 of 300 points in HTML5test.com, which trumps Dolphin (176) and the Android browser (176) by a substantial margin.
You can download the browser for Android or Maemo here. the Android version requires an OS version of 2.0 or higher. The required storage space is about 32 MB.
