Mozilla has finally released a public beta of Firefox 4 for mobile for download and test. But we would advise the cheering to be a bit restrained – the browser is available only for Android (version 2 and above) and Maemo users. Key highlights of the browser are Firefox Sync (which lets you synchronise browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, passwords and form-fill data between different devices) support for pinch to zoom, and the Awesome Screen, which lets you access your recent history, bookmarks and tabs just by tapping on the Awesome Bar. And improving the browsing experience under the hood will be Electrolysis and Layers. While the former lets the browser interface run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content, resulting in a much more responsive browser, the latter improves overall performance and in graphics areas such as scrolling, zooming and animations.
We just hope it all works, given the nightmares we have had with Fennec. If you want to try it out, click here. If you are an Android user, do so only if you have plenty of space to spare on your device – the browser needs a massive 32MB of internal memory to run!
