Mozilla recently announced that they would no longer be developing smartphones running Firefox OS and that they would eventually stop development of the software for the phones as well, but that doesn’t mean that they will cease development on their biggest products, like Firefox for Android, the wildly popular mobile version of their desktop browser. In fact, the Firefox browser app just received its most recent update, or rather it’s going out as of now and should be reaching users over the course of the next few days. Along with this update pushing users forward to version 43 stable, Mozilla has added in a handful of new and improved features to look forward to.
First off, the Firefox app now has indicators to alert users to the tabs that are playing audio, which may come in handy if you tend to open up plenty of tabs on mobile and forget which one you started playing a video on. This is also something users of the desktop Chrome browser have been used to for a little while, so if you use or have used Chrome on the desktop before you should be familiar with this feature and what it does.
Mozilla has also made some changes to the reading list, as users can now mark anything in the reading list panel as read or unread, this way they know they’ve already checked it out before which could save time. Those who need to make use of the Talkback features within Android will notice some improvements to the functionality within Firefox, specifically relating to the accessibility with things like scrolling and zooming as well as improvements to the BrailleBack support. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a modern update if it didn’t include at least a little bit of material design, and with this update, users will notice an updated toolbar which Mozilla states now better matches the current UI designs for Android. Another cool new tweak is the ability to share web page links from the site that selected text was taken from. So, for example, if you select a portion of text on any website and then share that with a friend, Firefox will now include the URL from the page where you pulled the text. There have also been some various bug fixes and improvements, as to be expected from nearly any app update. The Firefox for Android 43 should already be live in the Play Store.