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22 March 2011, 10:42

Mozilla issues Firefox 4 release candidate for Android and Maemo

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Firefox 4 for Mobile The Mozilla mobile project development team has announced the arrival of a first release candidate of Firefox 4 for Mobile, also known as "Fennec", for the Maemo-powered Nokia N900 and various Android devices. According to the developers, the latest development preview includes a number of changes and improvements over the previous Beta 5 release from last month.

This Firefox 4 for Mobile RC features improvements to the overall user experience (UX), as well as faster scrolling and better responsiveness with Firefox Sync. Support for copy and paste has been added to all form fields on web pages, sidebars are now easier to close without accidentally reopening them and Japanese is now included in the default set of languages for the Firefox user interface (UI).


Zoom Firefox 4 for Mobile on Android.
Source: Mozilla
Other changes include improvements to page load speed and JavaScript, reduced memory and CPU requirements, and various developer improvements, such as support for IPv6 on Android and new CSS properties. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

The mobile versions of Firefox are built on the same browser engine as Firefox 4.0, version 2.0 of the Gecko rendering platform, and include several elements from their desktop counterpart, such as built-in support for Firefox Sync, add-ons and the "Awesome Bar" smart URL bar. The Android version of Firefox 4 for Mobile requires version 2.0 of the Android OS or later and a list of supported devices is available on the Mozilla Wiki – users running Android 2.2 can move the Firefox 4 for Mobile app to their SD card to save space on their device.

Further information about the release candidate, including a short "What's new in Firefox for Android and Maemo" video, can be found in a post on the Mozilla Blog and in the release notes. Users can download Firefox 4 for Mobile RC1 by visiting Firefox.com/m/ from their Nokia N900 or Android-based device. The release notes also list downloadable versions of Firefox 4 for Mobile on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux which allow developers to evaluate the browser without using either an Android device or a Nokia N900.

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