While Google might be the father of Android, as well as the father of Google Chrome, that doesn’t mean we’re left without choices on Android, unlike iOS. On Android, we have all manner of different choices when it comes to web browser, and we’re free to make them our defaults, too. Mozilla’s Firefox, which used to be the web’s salvation from Internet Explorer before Chrome itself came along, is a popular choice on Android, offering a more flexible web browser experience, while at the same time giving people a smooth and speedy experience. This being Android, it’s unsurprising that there are developer builds of apps like Firefox, and unlike the Canary build for Chrome, Mozilla went with “Aurora” for their developer builds, and it’s just now landed in the Play Store.
To be clear, Aurora builds have been available on Android for a couple of years now, but this is the first time that it’s readily available from the Play Store, which means those looking to test the latest and greatest to hit Firefox on Android can just tap the button down below. Developer builds are usually where all the action takes place, where the developers themselves swap in and out new features, or implementations of those features and constantly try to fix bugs that might appear before it becomes a beta build. In this latest release, the first to hit the Play Store, there isn’t too much to write home about, apart from a new under-the-hood component to the rendering engine. This update includes support for the Skia graphics library, which is developed by Google, but like Android itself is open source for everyone else to use. The Skia graphics library should make the latest Firefox builds feel a little more immediate when rendering certain pages.
While this might not be the most exciting news for Android fans out there, fans of Firefox on their PC or smartphone now have something new to play with, but it should be noted that pre-release software like this can and will probably be buggy if you’re looking to use it as you would the stable version of Firefox.