Firefox Beta for Android: Simply Awful

Have you tried Firefox 4 Beta 1 for Android? We did and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Loading Firefox takes about 4 seconds to load for the first time which feels like a century. While default Android browser load in a flash, Opera Mini loads fairly quickly as well within 2 seconds. This was tested on a Samsung Galaxy S running on a 1GHz processor.

To make matters worse, Firefox takes up a huge 44MB of storage and the installer itself is already a 12MB. As comparison, Opera Mini only takes up 1.91MB on your device.

So does all that bulk make any difference? Well, most pages couldn’t load properly including this blog. Even the default mobile web version took us ages to load and we gave up loading the full web version. To rule out connectivity issue, we tested on other browsers and pages are displayed like a charm. Even Opera with its server side compression technology loads in couple of seconds.

When we successfully loaded a page on Firefox, the initial rendering is very jagged and it took a while for it smoothen the text out. Text input strangely doesn’t work all the time, especially when we struggled to perform a google search.

While waiting for our test pages to load, we took time to appreciate the featuers available. We liked the swipe left for tabs and swipe right for navigation, bookmark and settings as seen from previous Fennec releases. This is an easier approach to tabs compared to native browser and even Opera Mini.

We also found scrolling and pinch to zoom rather smooth. It really does feel better, almost as fluid as browsing on an iPhone Safari browser.

It is a pity that Firefox did badly in its core function, which is much worse than Fennec Alpha release. We’re not sure why but many others are facing difficulty to load pages too. There’s no point having a bloated piece of software that can’t do its intended job properly. We don’t mind usability short comings as long as we can view pages in a snap. Our verdict? Uninstall this piece of crap. This is the first time we’ve seen a beta that’s not usable.

If you face the same problem, do report it to Firefox.