Firefox 4 on Android.

Mozilla has released Firefox Mobile for Android and Maemo, bringing the company’s mobile browser up to par with the new desktop version of Firefox 4. Mozilla claims Mobile Firefox 4 is up to three times faster than Android’s default web browser, and offers syncing features you won’t find in any other mobile browser.

Android fans can grab a copy of Firefox 4 from the Android marketplace. Note that Firefox 4 for Android requires a ARMv7 CPU and 512 MB RAM. Sorry original Droid owners, you’re out of luck. If you’ve got a Maemo phone you can download Firefox 4 from Mozilla.

The first official release of Mobile Firefox 4 isn’t a stripped down version of what you’ll find on the desktop. In fact, it uses the same Gecko rendering engine as its desktop sibling, along with the same JavaScript compiler and the same HTML5 support, which means the latest and greatest on the web should be plenty speedy on your phone too.

Like Firefox 4 on the desktop, the mobile variant can handle themes and add-ons, though the desktop add-ons won’t work — you’ll need to find the mobile equivalent. Because this is the first real release of Mobile Firefox, the add-on offerings aren’t as extensive as what you’ll find for the desktop, but several popular add-ons — like AdBlock Plus and Readability — are already available.

Perhaps the best part of Firefox Mobile is the syncing capabilities, which best what you’ll find in Google’s default Android browser (or Mobile Safari on the iPhone for that matter). Just turn on Firefox Sync on your desktop and any bookmarks, passwords and, most importantly, open tabs, will be available on your phone.

Mobile Firefox 4′s syncing features mean you can walk away from the desktop and pick up exactly where you left off on your phone. If you use Chrome to Phone to sync your desktop and mobile browsing on Android, Mobile Firefox’s offering is similar, but it syncs in both directions and “just works” with no effort on your part.

Mobile Firefox 4 is also notable for one thing it lacks — Flash support. Given that no version of Firefox supports H.264 video — typically the fallback for mobile devices that don’t support Flash — the lack of Flash in Mobile Firefox may be a bit more of a problem than it is for Mobile Safari users.

You can check out Mobile Firefox 4 in action in the video below, which does a nice job of demonstrating the usefulness of the syncing features.

Photo: Johan Larsson/Flickr

See Also:

• Mozilla’s Leaner, Meaner Firefox 4 Arrives
• Early Version of Firefox Lands on Android Phones
• Firefox for Android Is Growing Up Fast

With over 7 million downloads and counting, Firefox 4 looks on track to match, and possibly surpass, the launch of Firefox 3. Firefox 3, which was released in 2008, saw some 8 million downloads in its first 24 hours and earned Mozilla a Guinness World Record for number of downloads in a 24-hour period.

Yesterday’s launch of Firefox 4 lacked the “download day” publicity stunt aspect of its predecessor — perhaps because, despite the record setting numbers, the launch of Firefox 3 brought Mozilla’s servers down and caused upgrade delays for many users — but that hasn’t stopped Firefox fans from upgrading in a hurry.

Firefox 4 is also likely the last time we’ll see a big release like this from Mozilla. The company is transitioning to a rolling release schedule like that of Google Chrome — less fanfare perhaps, but with more features arriving in less time.

Internet Explorer 9, which also launched with much fanfare this month saw 2.35 million downloads in the first 24 hours, according to a press release from Microsoft.

Of course all of these numbers are meaningless in the long run, what really matters is that the web has two new, much-improved web browsers. That means developers can start using more of the new tools in HTML5 and users will find the web a faster, more exciting place.

See Also:

• Mozilla’s Leaner, Meaner Firefox 4 Arrives
• Mozilla Plans Faster Firefox Development Model
• Internet Explorer 9 Arrives With More Speed, Better Web Standards Support
• Firefox 3 Wins Guinness Record for Most Downloads

The fourth major upgrade for Firefox was originally scheduled for the end of 2010, but the sheer number of new features pushed the deadline back several times. Now the wait is over — the new and improved Firefox 4 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Firefox 4 is a major overhaul, bringing a revamped user interface, hardware accelerated-speed improvements, built-in syncing and a significant upgrade under the hood. Page-rendering speed has been tripled, according to Mozilla, and the browser has increased support for web standards like native HTML5 video, fancy CSS 3 visual effects and native web fonts.

User interface

The most noticeable change in Firefox 4 is the revamped user interface, which streamlines the look and feel of Firefox. Tabs have been moved to the top of the browser window, above the URL bar. On Windows Firefox 4 matches Chrome’s tightly stacked tabs (which extend into the window’s title bar), and it does reduce the amount of space the tab bar takes up. On Mac OS X Firefox 4′s tabs don’t extend into the title bar. If you don’t like the tabs on top, there’s a preference option to revert to the old look.

Tabs are on top in the new Firefox 4.

The status bar, which has long lived at the bottom of the window, is now gone. Instead there’s an “Add-ons bar,” though it’s disabled by default. The main missing information in the status bar — the URL preview that shows up with you hover over a link — now shows up in a floating window, a la Google Chrome and IE 9.

Also gone in Firefox 4 is the RSS button, which, according to Mozilla’s research, no one was using. If you were among the few who did use the RSS button, it’s not hard to add it back.

Clearly Chrome’s minimalist user interface has inspired Firefox to clean up its look (Chrome had a similar effect on the recent release of Internet Explorer 9), but Firefox still has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Firefox 4 introduces a new feature dubbed “Panorama.” With it, you’ll be able to group and quickly switch between related clusters of open tabs. Designed for those of us over-stimulated fiends who frequently have dozens of tabs (or more) open at one time, Panorama allows you to conquer tab chaos. For example, you can group tabs for work and tabs for fun, and then quickly switch between groups.

App tabs save space in the tab bar.

This release brings another new feature, App Tabs, which allow you to pin sites you use frequently — Gmail or Facebook, for example — to persistent tabs that take up less space and will stay in place even when you switch between tab groups.

There are so many new features in Firefox 4 we don’t have the space to list them all here, but a few standouts in the new interface include the ability to switch to a new tab when you search in the URL bar, the slick new add-ons manager and privacy controls that stop websites from tracking your every move.

Syncing

Most of us use multiple screens every day — one or two computers, and at least one smartphone with a web browser — keeping it all in sync is increasingly difficult. That’s where Firefox 4′s sync tools come in, allowing you to pick up where you left off, no matter what device you’re using.

Firefox 4′s sync feature handles bookmarks, browsing history, user preferences and open tabs, allowing you to move between desktop and mobile versions of Firefox with all your data intact. Firefox Sync is simple to use: Just create a username and password, along with an encryption phrase, and Firefox takes care of the rest behind the scenes.

Unlike similar implementations in other browsers, Firefox 4 will encrypt all your data before sending it over the network to sync through Mozilla’s servers, which ensures that your data is protected from prying eyes (you can also host your own sync server if you’d like).

The sync updates in Firefox 4 coincide with similar improvements in Firefox Mobile 4 for the Android and Maemo mobile platforms. For iOS users there’s the Firefox Home app, which can give you access to all of your synced info. (Though any links you open will of course be rendered in iOS’ Webkit browser, not Firefox.)

The one missing feature in Firefox 4′s syncing is add-ons. As Firefox transitions to its new add-on format, it’s possible future releases will sync add-ons, as well.

Speed and hardware acceleration

Firefox 4 makes impressive speed gains (note tests show RC1)

There wouldn’t be much point to upgrading your web browser if the latest version wasn’t faster. And when it comes to speed, Firefox 4 delivers. Thanks to improvements in the Gecko rendering engine and the JavaScript engine, Firefox 4 is significantly faster than its predecessors.

This release also sees the first support for hardware acceleration. The idea behind hardware acceleration is to hand off processor-intensive tasks to the computer’s graphics card so that animations and page rendering are faster and smoother. Hardware acceleration is particularly helpful for common tasks like rendering text and graphics.

Internet Explorer 9 hyped its hardware acceleration when it launched last week, but Firefox 4 not only bests IE 9 in several tests, it also supports Windows XP, while IE 9′s acceleration is limited to Windows Vista and Windows 7.

In fact Firefox’s hardware acceleration works across platforms taking advantage of Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, XRender on Linux and OpenGL on Mac, to make animations and complex HTML5 applications run more smoothly. Firefox 4′s hardware acceleration is enabled by default on all supported hardware.

Web standards

Mozilla's Web o' Wonder shows off Firefox 4's HTML5 powers

Firefox has long been at the forefront of standards support, and this release is no exception. Firefox 4 brings support for HTML5 features like the audio and video tags (rendering native web video with the WebM and OGG codecs), as well as the new semantic elements and dozens of APIs, ranging from drag-and-drop file uploading to geolocation.

You’ll also find plenty of support for new CSS 3 features like transforms, transitions, media queries for responsive design and @font-face for embedding better-looking fonts in your web pages. To go along with the new font embedding, Firefox 4 now supports the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which joins the TrueType and OpenType support found in previous releases.

Firefox 4 also drops the -moz prefix for a number of more stable CSS rules, like border-radius and box-shadow.

Firefox 4 now supports WebGL, which means faster 3-D graphics and animations. WebGL bridges the gap between HTML5 tools like the new Canvas tag and OpenGL, an OS-native graphics engine, to speed up HTML5 web apps and animations.

To see the new HTML5, CSS 3 and API support in action, head over to Mozilla’s Web o’ Wonders demo page which showcases the new standards support in Firefox 4.

Conclusion

Firefox 4 is a massive overhaul and you should definitely upgrade. Not only is Firefox 4 faster, it brings the modern web to your desktop thanks to excellent web standards support.

Firefox 4 has finally graduated from beta testing to the release candidate stage. Even better, according to Mozilla’s weekly meeting notes, there are no show stopping bugs and “no need for an RC2 has been identified.”

If you’ve been using the Firefox 4 betas you’ll automatically be updated to RC1. If you’ve been waiting for something more stable than a beta, you can grab the release candidate from the Mozilla downloads page.

The latest Firefox 4 build offers “general stability, performance, and compatibility improvements.” Mozilla also reports that it has fixed more than 8,000 bugs since the first beta of Firefox 4 was released eight months ago.

The best news for long-time Firefox fans is that over 70 percent of Firefox add-ons have been updated to work with Firefox 4. If your favorite add-on hasn’t yet been marked as compatible with the latest release, you can help test it using the Firefox Add-ons Compatibility Reporter.

With the major bugs out of the way and the new features working as they should, Firefox 4 will likely arrive in final form very shortly, possibly as early as next week.

See Also:

• Firefox 4 Inches Toward Final Release with New Beta 12
• Mozilla’s ‘Web o’ Wonders’ Shows Off New Firefox 4 Tricks
• Firefox 4 Beta 10 Improves Stability, Uses Less Memory
• Mozilla Makes Plans for Firefox 5

Just ahead of the final release of Firefox 4 Mozilla has unveiled a new HTML5/CSS 3 showcase to demo some of the new web standards support coming in Firefox 4.

Google and Microsoft both released similar efforts to showcase Chrome and Internet Explorer 9, respectively. And, of course, there was Apple’s effort, but, thanks to some poor coding decisions, Apple’s showcase only works in Safari.

Mozilla’s new Web o’ Wonders website will work in any modern browser, though the video elements use the WebM codec, so you’ll need either Firefox 4, Chrome or Opera to watch the movies. Refreshingly, Mozilla’s Web o’ Wonders doesn’t conflate the various new web standards under the singular banner of HTML5 — SVG, JavaScript, CSS 3 and HTML5 are all called out separately, by name.

Right now there are only three demos on Web o’ Wonder, but Mozilla plans to add more, and you can submit your own experiments for consideration. The three experiments of the site now showcase HTML5 video, WebGL rendering and various CSS 3 and JavaScript techniques combined under the heading “design.” Particularly worth checking out is the HTML5 poster experiment which covers just about all the new HTML5, CSS 3 and JavaScript support in Firefox 4. Curious developers can click the “learn more” link to reach Mozilla’s developer page for each new feature listed.

Perhaps the best news, which arrives alongside the new demos is that Firefox 4 RC1 is just about done, with the final release likely not far behind it.

See Also:

• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9’s HTML5/CSS 3 Support
• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• Apple’s HTML5 Showcase Less About Web Standards, More About Apple

HTML5test.com scores for IE9 and Firefox

Mozilla then turned around and released an infographic that shows IE9 lagging well behind Firefox across the board — whether its HTML5 support, speed or CSS 3.

So who’s right? Well, both of them. IE9 is a huge leap forward for Microsoft. IE9 handles HTML5 and CSS 3 far better than its predecessors. As we said in our review of the release candidate IE9 is great news for web developers because it means the end of IE hacks and workarounds.

That said, IE9 offers nowhere near the level of HTML5 support found its competitors.

But what about Microsoft’s much-touted HTML5 compliance chart? Well, the tests used for that chart are the tests Microsoft developed for IE9 and submitted to the W3C. It should be no surprise that IE9 scores well in the tests it created, after all, those are the tests it was developed against.

IE9 does well on its own HTML5 tests

For something a bit less biased, grab a copy of the IE9 release candidate and point it any of the popular HTML5 test suites on the web — caniuse.com and HTML5tests.com are two good examples. Run IE9 RC1 and Firefox 4 through those tests and you’ll find that Firefox handy beats IE9 (as do Chrome, Opera and Safari). In fact, Firefox 3.5, which is over two years old, also handily beats IE9.

So how can Microsoft claim that IE9 is a “modern” browser with amazing HTML5 support? Well, Microsoft’s argument is that HTML5test and its ilk look for features that haven’t necessarily been finalized by the W3C. Microsoft’s rebuttal to Mozilla’s criticisms is that users don’t want experimental features, they want a fast browser that can handle HTML5 video, audio and canvas.

Microsoft’s Tim Sneath, director of Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism, says that “modern browsers implement features when they are ready, providing predictable patterns that developers can rely on rather than suddenly breaking or removing specifications.”

The problem with that claim is that, as we’ve often pointed out, the web doesn’t move at the speed of standards, it moves at the speed of innovative web browsers and developers. Sometimes there are hiccups along the way, but in taking the conservative track, IE9 is in danger of falling behind the web before it even makes it onto the web.

Internet Explorer’s market share has been in steady decline for several years now. IE has dropped from 68.5 percent world market share in July 2008 to 46 percent today (according to StatCounter).

Faced with dwindling market share and IE bashing in the web development community, many developers were hoping Microsoft would innovate, would build something amazingly far ahead of the competition. But that’s not the approach Microsoft has decided to pursue.

So while IE9 does an admirable job of catching up on web standards, it’s far from a leader when it comes to HTML5 and CSS 3 support. If you want a browser that works on today’s web, IE9 will make a fine choice. If you want a browser that’s already moving toward the web of the future then you might want to look elsewhere.

See Also:

• New IE9 Offers Geolocation, Privacy Controls and More Speed
• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9′s HTML5/CSS 3 Support
• Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support

Mozilla is wasting no time putting its proposed “Do Not Track” HTTP header onto the web. The latest Firefox nightly builds now include support for the new header and it may even make the final release of Firefox 4, due later this month. The new HTTP header, which Mozilla announced last week, is designed to tell online advertisers to stop tracking your web browsing habits.

If you’d like to see how Mozilla has implemented the header, grab the latest Firefox nightly build. There have been a few changes since Mozilla first announced its plan, including renaming the header to simply “DNT.”

To turn the header on, open Firefox’s preferences panel and select the Advanced tab (eventually Mozilla will add the option to the more appropriate Privacy tab). There you’ll see a new option to “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked.” Of course even if you turn the header on today and broadcast “DNT: 1″ to the web, it won’t do anything.

For the header to actually protect your privacy, websites and online advertisers will have to support it. While there’s plenty of debate as to whether they ever will, it definitely won’t happen until the feature is widely available. Mozilla is hoping that including the new header in Firefox 4 will spur advertisers to support it.

For now, broadcasting “DNT: 1″ will be, as Alexander Fowler, the Global Privacy and Public Policy Leader at Mozilla, puts it, “akin to displaying EFF’s Blue Ribbon campaign.”

The current plan is to test the privacy header in the next beta release of Firefox 4 and then, assuming there are no bugs, roll it out with the final release of Firefox 4 later this month.

See Also:

• Mozilla Plans ‘Do-Not-Track’ Privacy Tools for Firefox
• Chrome Add-on Kills Tracking Cookies
• New Privacy Icons Aim to Save You From Yourself
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data