Firefox for Android hasn’t received much attention lately from Mozilla — but for good reason. The company has been working on a new ‘Fenix’ browser designed to eventually replace the current Android Firefox browser. As part of an effort to shift all resources to the new browser, Firefox for Android will start to wind down in the coming months.
As spotted by Ghacks, a support document published by Mozilla outlines the company’s plans for replacing Firefox (referred to as ‘Fennec’ in the document) with Fenix. Firefox 67 and 68 for Android will be released as previously planned (on May 14th and July 9th, respectively), but afterwards, the browser will only receive bug fixes and security patches. Firefox 68.1 will be released on September 3rd, v68.2 will come on October 22nd, and so on.
Nightly build of Fenix
Mozilla says in the document that it continually has to divert resources from Fenix development to fix bugs and implement features in the current version of Firefox. Keeping the Android browser on the v68 branch will allow Fenix development to accelerate, but it also means that no new web features will arrive on Android until Fenix is completed.
The document did not say when Mozilla plans to finally release Fenix, but the current Firefox browser will reach End-Of-Life status sometime next year. Considering Fenix uses a completely different architecture under the hood (GeckoView instead of Gecko), it might take a while for the new browser to be ready for the masses.
If you want to try out Fenix, nightly builds are available here. Just select the proper APK for your device’s architecture — go with ‘aarch64 if you’re not sure.
- Source:
- Google Docs
- Via:
- Ghacks