By Stephen Schenck | December 21, 2011 11:28 AM
It’s been about a month-and-a-half since Firefox for Android moved up to version 8.0, bringing with it changes to the app’s rendering engine and featuring some new security options. Mozilla’s all about maintaining momentum with its browser releases nowadays, so it’s no surprise that Firefox 9.0 is already leaving beta, becoming the latest alternate browser option.
While there are changes with this release that will benefit smartphone users, the most prominent really focus on the browser’s tablet experience, instead. Users of Firefox 9.0 and Android tablets will notice a more optimized screen layout, including a full-screen portrait mode and the introduction of an action bar for quick in-app navigation.
Even though Mozilla still has its sights on Flash for Firefox, there’s little denying that the future of mobile interactive content is HTML5. To that end, Firefox 9.0 has some new HTML5 features like support for camera input and the introduction of new API calls to ease HTML5 development.
Any release like this is going to have some general tweaks and bugfixes, and the composite result of those all is that the browser is now faster to load. All-in-all, Firefox 9.0 for Android isn’t an earth-shattering update, but it looks like it delivers a solid assortment of changes, especially for tablet owners.
