Firefox 4 for Android: Desktop-Like Browsing for Your Phone

For all the rapid improvement that both Apples iOS and Googles Android have seen, one thing about both mobile operating systems hasnt changed much at all: their browsers. True, their technical underpinnings have been refined. But featurewise, they havent evolved at anywhere near the pace of their counterparts on PCs, where the competition among browsers is never-ending.

Thats one reason why Im in favor of browser competition being as healthy on smartphones and tablets as it is on computers. On iOS, thats not going to happen anytime soon--Apple doesnt permit full-blown browsers with their own rendering engines in the App Store. (Ones that use the Safari engine, such as the excellent Atomic Web Browser, are permissible; so is Opera Mini, which does most of its work on Operas servers, not on your phone.)

On Android, however, theres nothing stopping other companies from competing with the OSs built-in browser. Opera announced new versions of both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android a couple of weeks ago. And now Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 4 for Android.

I first wrote about the Android incarnation of Firefox last April, when it was known as Fennec and was a very rough draft. (In the interim, Mozilla decided to call it Firefox 4; thats more straightforward but should not be interpreted as evidence that the mobile browser is a carbon copy of its recently-released PC cousin.) Its come a long way-this finished version has a decidedly Firefoxy feel and is among the most feature-rich mobile browsers to date.


Firefox for Android doesnt render Googles standard browser obsolete overnight. For me, the biggest catch is that so many mobile Web sites are designed to work best on the Webkit-based browsers used by iOS and Android. If you go to Google Docs in Firefox and try to edit a file, for instance, you get a warning that your browser isnt supported. (I tried changing Firefoxs agent string to claim that the browser was iOS, but that only made maters worse.)

The browser runs on Android 2.0 and above, but its a phone app, not a tablet one; itll work on tablets, but just scales up the interface to fit the larger screen. Mozilla says it might build a tablet-specific Firefox eventually.

Oh, and Firefox for Android doesnt support Flash, even when its on a phone that has Flash installed. This doesnt strike me as a major downside, but you might feel differently; Mozilla says it might enable Flash later, but its mostly focusing on making HTML5 work as well as possible.

I like Firefox for Android. I like the fact that it gives Google some incentive to add more features to Androids default browser. And maybe Im a nutty optimist, but I think that the better browsing gets on Android phones, the more likely it is that Apple will beef up iOSs Safari. (Im not so optimistic that I believe Apple will permit other full-fledged browsers such as Firefox onto iOS anytime soon, but you never know.)

In short, Im glad that Firefox has finally landed on Android in a version thats ready for prime time. If youve tried it, let us know what you think...