New York — Performance is more important than the loads of add-ons that can be used to customize Firefox when it comes to Android devices, Mozilla said. Users of the Firefox browser in Android phones may soon have to live with fewer customization options as Mozilla is leaning more towards improving startup, responsiveness and memory use.
Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale announced on a mailing list that while the browser will still utilize the Gecko engine, it may abandon XUL in favor of Android’s native UI.
While going forward, Firefox will transfer to Android’s native user interface, replacing the XUL technology that has been utilized by Mozilla even before there was Firefox, Nightingale, added.
“It is still early days, so we have a lot of questions to answer. We are discussing with the Add-on SDK team about the best way to support extensions,” Nightingale said in a mailing list.
Unlike Apple’s Safari or the unbranded Google browser builds for Android, Firefox is widely embraced on personal computers but are actually not installed on any phones by default. Through Firefox, Mozilla attempts to implement its vision of keeping the Web an open technology as well as empowering its users.
“Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open Web, and this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible,” Nightingale said. Besides, with an indigenous Android interface project for mobile phones, there will be a faster start-up, smoother zooming ad panning, less memory usage and with a better battery life, Nightingale said.
Nightingale said abandoning XUL in favor of Android’s inherent UI may reap three benefits:
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Faster Startup: A native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL-based UI. This means startup times in fractions of a second, versus several seconds for a XUL UI on some phones.
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Memory Use: A native UI will use significantly less memory.
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Responsiveness: A native UI has the potential for beautiful panning and zooming performance.
In addition, XUL is the technology used by many developers in building add-ons for Firefox. While add-ons and customization have been among the attractions for Firefox, they have also been blamed for slowing down the browser.
It is not clear when the rebuilt version will arrive, but it would not be for either the beta or Aurora versions currently in testing, Nightingale said.
Start-up time is a major factor when comparing Firefox with the built-in browser on Android, especially since Firefox often gets kicked out of memory when not in use, forcing another sluggish load when a person taps a link and needs the browser again.
“After substantial discussion, we have decided to build future versions of Firefox on Android with a native UI [user interface] instead of the current XUL implementation,” Nightingale said.
However, for now, there is a lot of planning to do in regard to the transition.
He said it is too early to conclude when this work will be completed for users, although immediate future versions of Firefox will still use XUL, including the new UI for tablets.
“By the end of next week, we will have a clearer picture of the work ahead,” Nightingale said.