Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com Firefox for mobile for Android has been released as a final final version you may have known this previously as fennec for Android or for Windows Mobile its feature complete it is done it is ready for you to use and in this video we're going to talk about all of the features let's get to it so Firefox Mobile has come a very long way and it's finally good enough that you might want to use it as your daily browser so let's talk about what we have here it's a pretty big download actually it's about 15 megabytes so keep that in mind if you want to download it over Wi-Fi it may save you a little bit on your data connection so this is the this is what you see when you arrive in the Firefox application you can swipe to the left to see your open page is a really great way to manage tabs or you can swipe to the right to go back forward to check out your favorites to do settings and do some other things that we'll talk about in a minute now this has Firefox Sync and it'll sync up with the Firefox desktop browser which is awesome because you probably have a lot of tabs open at one time this lets you take your tabs with you really cool feature so let's swipe to the left and you'll see what I mean if I press the plus button to open a new tab I get four columns here I've got all pages bookmarks and these are all the standard built-in bookmarks history so I can see where I've been or desktop this is the coolest part says Brandon's Firefox running on Windows NT and share all of the five tabs that I have currently open on my desktop browser so I can pull up any of these pages that I have open and it will go there really quick just an awesome way to sort of integrate that experience from your from your desktop to your phone sort of its seamless experience so we can continue to add various tabs we can add let's say YouTube and Engadget and let's just load up a bunch of tabs and see how performance is with lots of tabs open this has really come a long way in terms of performance it used to be kind of slowing buggy but now it works really well and tabs will load simultaneously as you can see they're starting to load got a lot of tabs coming through there or for a Wi-Fi connection so should be pretty fast so just a couple of seconds later and we have all the tabs loaded now there are a few things that you can do from here first of all let's take a look at pinch-to-zoom performance and panning and scrolling so let's click down the page very quickly okay we get some checkerboard so not perfect in that respect we can stop it and we can pinch to zoom pretty good performance looks like we accidentally clicked on a link there and you can go back with the android back button or you can do a little swipe over here and use the buttons over there so let's zoom in on something pinch the scroll or pinch to zoom isn't as refined as it is on even the the default browser for Android now if we swipe over to the right you're going to see a few options here we can go right into the settings really nice and interface for the settings we get this tab design again and what we can do here is we can enable sync which I've got it and then it's connected to my desktop computer this doesn't have flash something to keep in mind here are some formatting options that you can take a look at we can go to the download manager which is a nice feature to have and of course plugins it's one of the coolest parts about Firefox is that the plug-in functionality has been brought over and you can get a little sampling of the plugins available I've already installed one that I want to show you you can install adblock bigger text there's just a lot of stuff here that really can extend the functionality of your mobile browser something that I have installed should show up up here it's called reading list so let's say we click on an article and maybe we're going to be going on the subway we're not going to have an internet connection or we're going on a plane or something we want to save an article to read later so we're gonna let this article load up and I'll show you exactly what this plug-in does and how well it integrates with Firefox for mobile ok so it's done I click on the little icon here and I go to save for later this is the save for later plug-in now if I swipe to the right and I go to the save for later list here are two articles that I've saved that are available for offline viewing pretty cool that you could do this with with a mobile browser and as you can see all of these tabs are open and we can close them sort of one at a time let's do a speed test just to get a sense for how fast this is compared to the built-in browser in android so we're in a load pocket now come on both of these let's go to pocket now we're going to load the desktop view by the way this is available in the Android Market so you can download it for free right when you are ready to don't want to go there right when you're ready to check it out so let's go to em pocket okay there all right great so let's go to the desktop site now as you can see right off the bat Firefox is not giving us that full screen view although we should have that option if we go to preferences and let's see do we have a full screen option doesn't look like we have a full screen option actually which is strange so sort of plus or one for the built-in Android browser because it allows you to do full screen view especially when you have the sense HTC Sense sort of overlay on top of it so let's do a desktop version at the same time see which one gets there first or over the same Wi-Fi network you can see the status bar shows you the loading and here you just get a little spinning cursor to show you that the site is still loading okay so it looks like the Chrome browser or the stock browser on Android finished first and a little bit soon after that we got the load on Firefox for mobile you can tell just the difference in pinch to zoom it seems kind of slower on the on the firefox browser let's click these links at the same time and see kind of missed that kind of do it a second after see how fast that is so performance isn't as good as you would get on Chrome for Android but in terms of versatility you really have a lot of really fantastic options a lot of fresh interface choices with the tabs on the side and the ability to jump to the favorites list just by clicking over here and swiping to the right some pretty good gesture support and of course we can go into landscape as well we'll have to come back and talk about sort of long term how this bears as your daily driver browser because certainly looking at it for five minutes doesn't really do it justice in terms of how it functions on a longer term basis so give Firefox mobile a try download it from the Android Market drop a to comment and let us know if you're gonna use it as your daily driver browser and how you how you like it or if you even like it and please give us a thumbs up if you like this video and thanks for watching that's it for now