Andre Yoskowitz
15 Oct 2011 16:00
Mozilla Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale has announced this week that the Android version of their platform will dump the XUL technology used in all desktop Firefox editions.
"Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open Web, and this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible," added Nightingale.
While Firefox has over 20 percent market share on PCs, it has yet to meaningfully break into the mobile market which is controlled by Apple's Safari and Android's Chrome variant.
By moving away from XUL and into a native Android interface, the browser should use less memory and have a much faster boot time, stuff even the average Joe user cares about.
Concludes Nightingale: "After substantial discussion, we have decided to build future versions of Firefox on Android with a native UI [user interface] instead of the current XUL implementation."
Under the hood, the browser will still use the Gecko processing engine, says Cnet.