“Mozilla has announced a new alpha release of its Fennec mobile browser for Android and the Nokia N900. Fennec offers support for add-ons and has tight integration with Firefox Sync, a browser synchronization service that was formerly called Weave. The support for Firefox Sync is arguably Fennec’s killer feature, especially because Mozilla is planing to include the synchronization features out-of-the-box in Firefox 4. Users will be able to have access to the their bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs across all of their computers and supported mobile devices.”
The version of Fennec that comes with N900 is already terribly horribly slow, I can only imagine how slow an alpha build on an Android can be. I only have to wonder how the heck can it be so slow when Opera on the same hardware literally flies. Sure, Opera doesn’t sport addon functionality, but otherwise it seems to have all the same functionality, including support for all the same CSS tricks and all and yet comparing Fennec to Opera is like comparing night to day. How come?
1. The extra layer of open-source goodness.
2. Opera keeps all of the bits in cold storage prior to release.
3. [truth] Opera has a boat-load of experience making mobile browsers [/truth]
Opera has also had a sync feature between it’s desktop and mobile browsers for at least a few years now.
4. Mozilla don’t know how to make non-bloated software (though there has been BIG improvements in the last few years).
Edited 2010-08-31 20:47 UTC
Great to hear they’re working in add-ons for Fennec. I haven’t had a chance to look, but hopefully it won’t be terribly difficult to port my extensions. The extension framework has always been Firefox’s greatest feature. There are very few things you can’t do, as long as you don’t mind tearing your hair out for a few weeks trying to figure out how.
I bet it’s the XUL/Javascript interface that’s making it sluggish.
I’ve used Fennec on my N810 and it’s actually fares alright. Still not better than the built-in browser (wouldn’t take much to surpass it either) but it’s the only other decent browser available for it. If they worked on integration a little bit more then I might use it as a default, but sadly I don’t think they support it anymore.
I launched it on my Droid and after an hour it still hasn’t loaded…
It’s busy caching the whole web. After it’s done, you just watch it fly!
I would like to try… but there’s no way to spare 30MiBs for this… really, hard to imagine any android app that is this size besides games that have lots of media files…
by the way, 30MiBs is about 10-20 normal android apps…
There was a video demo on BetaNews recently. Indeed just like its mature brother, it takes ages to start. I really don’t know how can other companies make their browsers start so quickly but Mozilla cannot. I also have a feeling it has to do with the XUL based interface as everything based on XUL so far seems very slow including Thunderbird according to my observations.
I didn’t even bother installing this thing on my Hero. My free RAM is hovering around 70-90% with no apps running. Launch SMS, Browser, other small utilities and it quikcly drops. Knowing FF for PC takes so much RAM, I can only imagine what will happen to my free RAM when I launch FF on my Hero and probably that battery will drain quite quickly. Not worth it. I think it’s time for the FF developers to get their act together and start focusing on startup performance and resource usage otherwise people will start turning away. I switched from IE to FF about two years ago but now I am considering Chrome or IE again due to FF resource usage.
OOo got their act together….so can Mozilla.
Edited 2010-08-31 09:32 UTC
You are drawing a conclusion based on speculations.
Then you shouldn’t get anywhere near Opera… whose problem is definitely not startup time (where it flies) but shutdown time: the process never disappears from the task manager in under 10 seconds. I’ve had instances where, after 15 minutes, the process was still running. What would be so hard to do that the shutdown would take ages, I don’t know.
Very true. Some of the previous versions were a real pain as to startup speed.
You are drawing a conclusion based on speculations.
You know, everyone does base their expectations on a new thing by basing them on speculations drawn from past experiences. That is part of the learning process.
Then you shouldn’t get anywhere near Opera… whose problem is definitely not startup time (where it flies) but shutdown time: the process never disappears from the task manager in under 10 seconds. I’ve had instances where, after 15 minutes, the process was still running. What would be so hard to do that the shutdown would take ages, I don’t know.
You didn’t state the platform you are using so I can’t really make assumptions about that. But perhaps the shutdown took so long because of a run-away plugin instead? Or was it a beta version, maybe? What little I use Opera on my desktop to test my websites I’ve never had issues with it and it’s always shut down as supposed to. On my N900 I use Opera as my browser of choice because it just flies on it and I’ve never had issues with it there either.
True. Sorry.
I’m running Vista SP2 mainly these days on my every day use laptop and Windows XP SP3 on a second laptop that I use as a server. On both systems, the shutdown time is often very long while on Mac OS X on my previous professional laptop it took a split second.
As I only use Opera, and Firefox when pages won’t work in Opera, I can’t close the running instance and restart it when it reaches a high memory consumption. The problem is known and has been reported and discussed on their forums several times.
I understand what you are saying but I personally believe start up performance is more important than shutdown. I am not saying it shouldn’t get fixed, it definitely should but the start up impact is greater. When you shutdown a browser, the window disappears and it becomes a background process which will exit eventually.
Seems to work allright from my previous experience with Fennec test releases, but I couldn’t get NoScript to install from the addons site so I stopped fiddling with it for now.
I have install NoScript on a win32 build of Fennec recently so I think that may just be a configuration adjustment to remedy.
our website :[www.popbuynow.com]
(b..r..a..n..d.)s.h.o.e.s.(34u.s.d),,
==J. a .m .e )) shoes
< j o r d a n> (1-24) shoes
< j o r d a n> 2010 shoes
c.l.o.t.h.i.n.g,,j.e.a.n,,h.a.n.d.b.a.g(35u.s.d),,
==c .o. a .c .h )) handbag
(f.r.e.e)s.h.i.p.p.i.n.g
[www.popbuynow.com]
[www.popbuynow.com ]