Mozilla has recently been hard at work improving its Firefox Android browser. Shortly after releasing an update which added significant performance improvements and a lot of useful user interface tweaks, the free-software community released another mobile version of its Internet browser. Luckily for Firefox users, the number of improvements is even longer this time around. Namely, the latest iteration of the popular app features expanded support for the multi-process solution responsible for the original aforementioned performance improvements and an offline page viewing mode. In addition to that, the Android browser now remembers zoom levels and scroll position in all of your open tabs while it hides outdated tabs when its restore tabs setting is set to “Always” in the app’s options.
Regarding new performance improvements, Mozilla claims the browser is four times more responsive in comparison to the previous build. It’s hard to say whether that’s completely true just from using it, but the overall user experience definitely feels a lot smoother. The app’s developers announced that the multi-process technology will be further expanded upon in the coming months and Firefox for Android will only get better as time goes on. As for the offline reading mode, it works almost identically to its desktop counterpart that’s been available for years. So, if you have an unstable connection, finding and enabling the offline viewer in Firefox settings may be a smart thing to do. What this mode does is basically caches every page you visit so that you can revisit it even without a connection. It still doesn’t work perfectly, as it slows down the overall performance a bit but it’s a welcome addition to the growing feature set of the Android version of Firefox.
The latest update doesn’t bring any major security improvements to the popular mobile Internet browser but that’s mostly because Firefox is currently pretty secure as it is. The new version of the app doesn’t differ from its predecessor in terms of requirements so it’ll still work on pretty much any Android smartphone or tablet running Android 4.0.3 and newer. All in all, if you were on the fence over replacing your mobile browser with Firefox, this update should be reason enough for you to at least give Mozilla’s most popular app a chance.