Well, that was quick. Just hours after Mozilla announced late Tuesday that it had renewed its lucrative search royalties deal with Google, the announcement came of a new Mozilla Firefox browser optimized specifically for Android tablets.
The Firefox for Android tablets is available now for free in the Android Market.
Features specific to the tablet version include a “magazine-like” navigation between open tabs, which appear as previews of the pages in the left column of the tablet when held horizontally (landscape mode), and a new “Action Bar” menu, which collapses a number of common browser functions — from preferences to search — into a drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner of the browser.
Watch a video of the the new Firefox for Android tablet app here:
“Magazine-like” has become even more of a buzzword for tablet apps as of late thanks to the success of the magazine-like Flipboard news reading app for the iPad and the launch of Google’s clear competitor for Android, Google Currents.
But this new tablet-specific browser would appear to be the fruit of Mozilla’s newly-intensified focus on mobile.
There is no Firefox for iOS devices at present and there likely won’t be one in the near future, either, due what Mozilla and others characterize as Apple’s onerous terms preventing any apps from replicating Apple functionality on the devices (in this case, Apple’s Safari mobile browser).
As Mozilla notes on its Firefox Home for iPhone page (that’s an app that allows users to access their Firefox browsing history on their iPhones using Safari): “We do not have plans to ship the full Firefox browser for the iPhone. Due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users Firefox for the iPhone.
But Mozilla did release a version of Firefox for Android phones in March, which has been downloaded upwards of 5.4 million times since then, Businessweek reported. Still, that only accounts for a paltry 0.03 percent market share of all mobile browsers, according to NetMarketshare, a Web tracking firm.
Clearly, building a version for Firefox for the 6 million Android tablets estimated to be currently in use around the globe is an attempt to reverse this trend.
And lucky for Mozilla, Android tablet sales are poised to increase by more than double this quarter alone, driven in large part by low-cost Android tablets the Kindle Fire ($199) and the Nook Tablet ($249).
Unfortunately for Mozilla, both of those devices run heavily forked, custom versions of Android with their own separate Android app stores controlled tightly by Barnes & Noble and Amazon, respectively. The Firefox for Android tablets app isn’t currently available in either store.
The question remains when, if ever, Firefox for Android tablets will be available in those alternative Android app stores. Amazon, after all, spent some time and resources developing its own much-hyped Silk browser for the Kindle Fire, which utilizes Amazon’s cloud servers to enable faster browsing.
We’ve reached out to Mozilla, Amazon and Barnes & Noble for more information and will update when we receive a response.
