Mozilla aims to speed up Firefox on Android with native interface

Mozilla has announced that future releases of its Firefox browser for Android devices will have a native look and feel in place of the current user interface to improve the browser's performance.

The move was announced in an update to developers by Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox engineering at Mozilla, who stated that Firefox on Android would, however, continue to be based on the Gecko rendering engine.

Firefox currently operates with an XML-based user interface developed with Mozilla's own XUL toolkit, but Nightingale said the move to a native UI would improve performance, shorten startup times and improve responsiveness, while it is also expected to be more efficient in memory usage.

"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," he wrote.

"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."

Mozilla said it is still too early to indicate when users might see the native Firefox on Android, but it will not impact versions already in the Beta and experimental Aurora channels.

Firefox 8 and 9 will ship with the XUL-based user interface, including the new UI design for tablets.