The good folks at Mozilla just chimed in to inform us of a new beta release (4) of Firefox 4 for Android Beta. They’ve been hammering away at the app ever since Google released the Android NDK, and while it’s been more of a diamond in the rough, you have to expect that they’ll get it up to speed soon enough.
They’re touting speed improvements across the board: not only have they promised increased application performance (particularly in the neighborhoods of panning and zooming), but they’re claiming javascript performance is even faster than the stock Android browser – and we know Android 2.2’s browser to be pretty damn fast.
- Recent tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser
- Roughly three times faster on Kraken
- Twice as fast on SunSpider
Android 2.2’s browser uses the V8 engine, and Firefox says performance is still slightly better than it with the same engine. With this release, they’re also touting that nearly 200 plugins have been created for their mobile browsers. That’s quite impressive for phones, but you had to expect they wanted to make a big push for a desktop-like experience with the advent of Android tablets.
Check out more of their announcement and release notes here, and look for Firefox in the Android market to try it out for yourself.