Mozilla to Ditch the Current UI for Firefox on Android to be successful

Mozilla has recently decided that in order to improve Firefox for Android they need to dump XUL-otherwise known as eXtensible User interface Language, the language thats currently used to develop a consistent Firefox look and feel across multiple platforms-and start using Google native Android interface widgets. This does not mean that Mozilla is going to stop using their Gecko rendering engine that makes

Firefox what it is, it just means that they will ditch their attempts at creating a consistent user interface in order to deliver users a better experience. Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox Engineering, announced the decision on the mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile usenet group, saying the three major areas that should see drastic improvement are:

• 01: Startup - A native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL based UI, since it can happen in parallel with Gecko startup. This means startup times in fractions of a second, versus several seconds for a XUL UI on some phones.

• 02: Memory use - We believe a native UI will use significantly less memory.

• 03: Responsiveness - A native UI has the potential for beautiful panning and zooming performance.