Mozilla releases Firefox 14 with Flash support and other new features – Part 1

Mozilla released a new revamped version of Firefox for Android named Firefox 14. It is the major revamp to web browser, dedicated to mobile computing, since March 2011 when the company released the original Firefox for the mobile devices.

The Android version was released concurrently with the PC and Mac versions for desktops in March, but unlikely the desktop iterations the mobile browser attracted opprobrium on a number of fronts. The company slated it incompetent in the next few months and started working on the new browser six months after the release of the original one.

“In the fall of last year, we realized [the original Firefox for Android] was not good enough, not performing the way we wanted it to,” Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s director of Firefox engineering, explained over the phone yesterday. “So we made the call in October to rewrite it.”

In October, the company started to re-design and re-write Firefox for Android. However, there were some caveats that they had to eradicate before re-engineering the mobile web browser.

“Re-writing the native UI we knew would take three to four months, which gave us the instant start up,” he said. The old Firefox for Android suffered from a severe lag from when you tapped its icon to the point where the browser finished loading. But, Nightingale said, “The panning and zooming performance required building a whole new architecture.”

The new browser carries on with the numeric series of the updated and upgraded Firefox versions and the new release is called the Firefox 14. However, Nightingale said that considering the work done on the new version, it really is the new Firefox 1.0.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Jul 5 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.