Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocket now calm let's go take a look at Firefox nine for Android for those of you who are interested in alternate web browsers for your android-powered device Firefox has been around for well a little while we had some early fennec betas and alphas and now we've got full-blown Firefox and today they've released or earlier this week they've released and today we're going to show you firefox 9 which adds some cool html5 stuff some speed but it keeps with the flavor that we're used to with Firefox for Android so first of all let's go back to our home screen over here the Firefox logo is the same as what you'd expect on a desktop browser opening and launching it is relatively quick it takes a few more seconds to launch the first time in this case it was already in memory but overall it's pretty quick now one thing you will want to keep in mind this is about 15 megabytes it's going to take quite a bit of time to download over a 2g and possibly even over a 3g network so keep that in mind you may want to do it over Wi-Fi once it's downloaded and installed it's pretty quick so let's come and look at some of the basics first of all you can see there's some ice cream sandwich kind of interesting things I believe it's ice cream sandwich you've got your fav icon over here and your reload button over there they don't really fit this space it feels kind of awkward but that's probably because this is a much larger resolution screen this of course being my gsm Galaxy Nexus running ice cream sandwich or Android 4.0 if you pull over to the side that was a little gesture that you saw me do just pull to the side now you can see your thumbnails of the the tabs essentially that you have open on the screen you can quickly and easily switch between them so let's come up here for example and load in pocket now over on the other side we can set that as a favorite okay add that to the home screen if we want edit it all kinds of cool stuff go back and forward and get into our settings it's kind of interesting I have a menu button down here the legacy menu button and then I have a settings cog right here that do kind of the same thing but kind of different let's see that again so down here's your menu you can get into preferences there that's the same thing as if you were to just hit that so a little bit of redundancy kind of interesting while we're here in preferences if you want to go to the about page which is what i showed you first you can select that button language you can pre define or have it auto detect essentially the website you go to is going to tell you what language it's in and that's what this is going to use if you want to hard code it to something you can do that of course if it's not written in that language that's not translation that's just how it's going to interpret the characters the start page you can come in and set it to whatever you want your current page a blank page or the Firefox start I've got it set to the default which is Firefox start and sinking this is very cool you can sync your contacts across essentially across the cloud so if you've got Firefox's your browser on your desktop computer and you have favorites stored there you have usernames and passwords stored there you can sync this all across so that it's the same experience on your mobile devices it is on your desktop device it's not two separate experiences you have the same things on both sides privacy and security what you'd expect you can use a master password to get into your password screen if you want to be able to reformat the screen when you zoom or the contents on the screen when you zoom you can do that it's off by default and it works pretty well being off but if you run into some weirdness go ahead and toggle that showing images in the enabling JavaScript if you want speed uncheck both of those and it'll speed things up quite a bit and show character encoding just for some I don't even know why you'd want to do that if you know let us know in the comment you have a download manager now so if you want to see your download so you can look in the list here and this is what sets Firefox apart from everybody else Firefox has plugins and when I say everybody else I'm talking mobile devices because everybody on the desktop has plugins and whatnot right so over here you can look at what current plugins or add-ons are I've got my google integrated search installed my Amazon integrated search twitter integrated search and Wikipedia integrated search all of those came stock with the browser if I don't want to get more I can search for them or I can see some of the more popular ones I can essentially get a tutorial what is an add-on one of the most popular ones out there is a block ad block plus if I can pronounce that essentially this blocks ads you might like that you might not website to make their living off of displaying ads you don't like looking at ads so kind of lay that out and once you've gotten over the the moral dilemma make whatever choice you want there if you want to make your text bigger you can do that here you can also do that in the settings for your your whole operating system this handles it a little bit better when you're looking at it in web pages clear mobile history you can add a clear history button to the Firefox preferences so you don't have to dig in an extra level deeper so kind of cool and then a whole bunch of other stuff and when I say a whole bunch now keep in mind the more add-ins you add the slower your browsing experience is going to be speaking of browsing experience how is it well that's kind of two sides to a coin let's go ahead and look at this verizon motorola droid razr coming out go ahead and open that up now i'm on Wi-Fi it's a 20 megabit connection down you can see it is taking a little bit of time to load in initial page loads on firefox seem a little bit slower than in the Chrome browser when you scroll you're not getting kind of partial page Scrolls you're getting blocks of just black that then is filled in which takes just a moment you have your pinch to zoom and that's one of my other homes if you take a look at this again big black swath while it's loading the text looks good it scrolls well when you're doing it slowly just not when you're jumping because you know you have that big block so here's my other chrome you look at this I now have something that's too wide to fit on the screen so I'm going to scroll to the side but I'll eventually when I scroll to the side I'm going get that bar the bars essentially are now way off to the side you can get them by you know anywhere you are just by scrolling in from well you should be able to from scrolling in from the side of the screen but you can't it's the edge of the browser window so that makes these kind of things hard to get at when you are zoomed into a site not all that cool but kind of a you know the other side of the coin there once you get this thing loaded it really excels in html5 and JavaScript if you've got any kind of html5 on here it's fast blazingly fast css3 transformations really fast I don't have any good examples to show you however just visit your sites and take a look that's where it excels once the content is on the device once the page is loaded then interacting on it is really really quick quite a bit faster in fact then the chrome browser that comes with the Android operating system even the new one that comes with ice cream sandwich so really quick look showing off a couple things that you guys want to see one more I always get kind of in trouble in the comments for only showing the pocket now website so let's go ahead and show another one here's Apple for example loads up pretty quick in gadget and I haven't loaded any of these so they're not cashed at all this is just a straight load from the web across the life I to the device so engadget takes a little bit more time to load it's a heavier site as far as content goes again the big black block while scrolling over although once it is loaded the scroll is pretty good and pretty fluid I like that quite a bit and so we don't play favorites let's go out to microsoft com so you can take a look at that load there as well so kind of quick still loading in a little bit it doesn't even look like you'd imagine it's supposed to be because this is trying to be a mobile page and it's a not doing really well at that so hey Microsoft you might want to take a look at that and see if you can make that experience a little bit better because I think it's supposed to look like that anyway so showing off firefox nine if we can get back to the wherever I found that firefox 9 for android for pocket out I'm Joe Levi hmm