Comments on: A Look at Firefox Mobile

By: Chris Duvall

Chris Duvall — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:19:25 +0000

I am running into the same issue as @cweberusa.

The device I’m designing for is the Samsung Galaxy II/2 Skyrocket shich is speced with a screen size of 400X800.

When I use the @media query in my CSS document, “@media screen and (max-width: 320px)” and @media screen and (max-width: 535px) are the queries that work for portrait and landscape views.

I may not even know what I’m talking about here, but I guess maybe I don’t understand the difference between the viewport resolution and the device resolution. And, I don’t know how to determine the viewport resolution or which one I should design for.

I’d love to get to the bottom of this and understand better.

Thanks!
Chris

By: mbrubeck

mbrubeck — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 02:07:26 +0000

Firefox for Mobile does support CSS3 Media Queries, though it’s completely possible that there are bugs in Firefox, or differences in the way we’ve interpreted the specs.

Note that if you want the screen size, you should use the “device-width” query (instead of just “width”). Or you can set “width=device-width” in your meta viewport tag, and then use “width” to query the viewport width in CSS pixels.

Anyway, if you have a page that doesn’t work correctly in Firefox, please let us know! You can report the bug at support.mozilla.org or bugzilla.mozilla.org, or contact me personally, mbrubeck@mozilla.com.

By: cweberusa

cweberusa — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:13:33 +0000

“The other thing is that Firefox Mobile is recognized by many of the sites I tried as a desktop browser.”

Worse still, Firefox Mobile does not honor CSS3 queries, and/or lies about your devices screen size. On one of my sites I rely on a CSS query about display width to include a mobile stylesheet. Works great with most mobile browsers (well, let’s not worry about Opera Mini, which does server-assisted shenanigans). However, Firefox Mobile does not report the true width of the device it runs on and hence ends up without the mobile stylesheet. That’s just bad all around.

By: david braun

david braun — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:57:11 +0000

Couldn’t vote (no – too slow to load/render) because Facebook wouldn’t work with HTTPS!

By: samandiriel

samandiriel — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:56:49 +0000

I have the original Droid, and was hugely disappointed with FF. It takes FOREVER to load, a really long time to process pages compared to the native browser, and crashed about every two minutes.

It also REALLY slowed down my phone, even in the background, and in some cases it took the UI up to a minute to respond while FF was running.

By: masinick

masinick — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:07:01 +0000

Joe, I have a lower powered Android unit than yours – the original Motorola Droid. I have the standard Android Web Browser, the Dolphin Web Browser, Opera, and Firefox. I find Dolphin to be the most usable overall, with the standard browser right behind. Neither Opera nor Firefox, at least the releases I’ve tried, work anywhere near as well as the native browsers. Perhaps that will change in time, but I think that Google did a better job with this platform than either Mozilla or Opera as of the time I’ve tried each. They are much more competitive browsers on the Linux and Windows platforms than they are on a one year old Android, where I just don’t think either has enough oomph to get the job done. I don’t want to wait a minute for a single page to render, and that’s sometimes what I face with Opera and Firefox on a Droid.

By: mbrubeck

mbrubeck — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:01:45 +0000

Hi, thanks for the review. You might want to know that Firefox for Mobile 4.0rc1 is scheduled to be released tomorrow, and fixes several of the bugs in the beta releases.

For some specific issues you mentioned, the Phony add-on lets you change the user-agent for sites that don’t detect Firefox as a mobile browser, and the Show Tooltips add-on lets you view XKCD’s tooltips.

(There’s also http://m.xkcd.com/ which works in any browser.)