After teasing us with an announcement less than a week ago, Mozilla has announced today that version 14 of the Firefox browser has been released into the Google Play store. Promising faster load times and rendering they also advise that the panning and zooming in webapps will also be faster.
The new version offers a personalised start page also known as the Awesome Screen and utilises Firefox Sync to deliver all your browsing history, bookmarks, passwords and form data to your Android phone. This version of Firefox also supports Flash which is an advantage over Chrome on Ice Cream Sandwich, although the need for such support appears to be waning across the mobile web. The browser as a whole feels a lot faster and looks a lot better at least it does to me personally.
Mozilla advises that the new Firefox scores quite high on existing benchmarks such as Sunspider but they have also created a new benchmark called Eideticker that apparently measures the speed of browsing in terms of user experience.
Mozilla has also integrated all new HTML 5 standards into the browser and also created new APIs : Camera API, Vibration API, Mobile Connection API, Battery Status API, Screen Orientation API and Geolocation API in order to help move the web along, personally I feel writing and including these APIs may be a move towards their Boot to Gecko project though, your thoughts?
In the What’s New section of the Play store entry it advises that some of the new features are for ‘PHONES only’ in fact there are a few caveats to the release including : Flash not supported on tablets and non-ICS Tegra 2 devices, Galaxy Note stylus issues with keyboard & Find in page not supported.
Anyway, if your browser of choice is Firefox, then check out the update in the Play store and give it a go, or watch the video :
