Mozilla previews new, cleaner Firefox for Android UI on Nightly build

DNP Firefox Nightly UI change

Before you know it, you’ll be enjoying a cleaner, shinier Firefox UI on Android — but not before Mozilla gets the more adventurous to test it out. The brand-spanking new interface merges the Start Page and the Awesomescreen, which is what you see after tapping on the URL bar. Thus, it will house your history, bookmarks, reading list and most visited websites in one place. While Mozilla UI engineer Lucas Rocha calls it the “biggest UI change in Firefox for Android” since the app was released, the update isn’t quite yet ready. If you’re unafraid of testing unstable releases, however, you can take the new UI for a spin via Firefox Nightly — Mozilla’s launchpad for new features. Everyone else, feel free to head past the break for a comparison image of the current and future interfaces.

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Via: Android Police

Source: Lucas Rocha, Firefox Nightly

Firefox Nightly now packing OdinMonkey JavaScript optimization

DNP Firefox nightly now packing OdinMonkey, turns Java

Today, Firefox‘s Nightly channel received a pick me up in the form of its asm.js optimizer known as OdinMonkey. Baked into June’s stable release of Firefox 22, this subset of Mozilla’s rendering engine lets developers compile C or C++ to JavaScript by using Emscripten. This gives the code the potential to run within 2x its native performance. For those of you who’ve now gone cross-eyed, simply put this should give Firefox a hefty performance boost and open the door to more sophisticated browser-based games as well as faster web apps. For its inaugural offering, OdinMonkey is only available to Windows and Linux users, but the company says that OSX and ARM version are near completion.

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Luke Wagner (blog)