Firefox for Android updated, now optimized for tablets
The Android version of Mozilla Firefox has come a long way, but even after this latest update, things feel like they are to cover some more ground yet before it is adopted as widely as its desktop counterpart. The 9.0 version brings a lot of new features, mostly oriented towards the tablet more than the smartphone, but significant features nonetheless.
The app will now feature open tabs on the left hand side of tablet’s display for easy switching between them with just the touch of a thumb – this will automatically change to thumbnails if the tablet is held in the portrait mode in order to conserve screen real estate and use that for the actual webpages. A new feature called “Action Bar” will now reside on the top-left corner of the display to give quick access to various options like settings, add-ons etc. Also added in now is support for HTML5 input tag for the camera, which will enable devs to provide access to the camera directly from within the browser.
The improvements all seem good, though the lags in loading times and the heavy app size (15MB) still remain. For Firefox to truly turn mobile, it will need to focus mainly on these issues among many others. Until then, I am sticking with my trusty old Dolphin browser, a far lighter and much more intuitive alternative to Firefox.
