Mozilla Tells Google Our Browser Isn't Just Better, It's Awesome

So Mozilla, a non-profit foundation who's major financier is Google, just announced a new open source version of Firefox for Android ... that claims to be better than the native version of the browser that Google currently offers for smartphones and tablets.

"Thanks for funding us, here's what we did with our money"

Putting aside the weirdness of that what makes it better? Here's the breakdown.

• New and improved interface
• Faster performance and better synchronization with the Sync feature, which allows users to keep track of bookmarks, passwords and open tabs on several desktop and mobile PCs.
• The browser contains an interface for managing multiple tabs, with the help of the same features found in desktop version, which automatically receives the URLs that visitors have been on before. -- it's called the Awesome Screen
• Three times faster than Android’s own browser, thanks to the Java-based scripting engine Jaeger Monkey which is also used to run JavaScript in the desktop version of Firefox 4th

“The new Firefox for Android gives people a powerful mobile Web with faster start-up time, a new look and feel, Flash support and Firefox Sync to give you access to Awesome Bar history, saved passwords, bookmarks and open tabs across your computers and Android phone,” Mozilla announced Tuesday. “Firefox for Android is super speedy and highly customizable, and touts industry-leading privacy and security features.”

That's all great and everything but early reports say all of this is really bells an whistles and the app itself isn't all that grand, kind of slow and lacks Flash support. At this point there's no quantifiable data to prove or disprove this but at least on the positive thanks to Google's money and the new design they have put into designing the web browser itself, this open source browser will remain alive and well for some time to come, regardless of how well Google’s own Chrome browser adoption accelerates on Android devices.

• sdeena's blog