Firefox ARMv6 experimental builds [UPDATED 05.11]

[Guest Sulthekk]

It took a while but it's finally there!

Plugins are not all compatible, because those are Firefox 13 (Minefield) builds, and compatibility checking is based on version number. Although it's alpha, I'd say it's quite stable. :D

UPDATE: Found newer builds over at xda, version 15. Scrolling isn't as smooth as the older version, but still great, and finally things are rendered almost instantly, no delay, no grey background!

Thread and download link can be found at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=25856354#post25856354

Builds are made by xmixahlx.

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KNOWN WORKING PLUGINS (If you find something else, please post it there):

-Phony

Edited May 11, 2012 by Sulthekk

[Guest weeo]

Thanks mate. You da best :-)

[Guest Sulthekk]

All thanks go to Ted over at Bugzilla. He's the guy who made it possible. Interesting fact, that in his twitter post he used a white Blade to show off that he got it up and running.:)

[Guest mum1989]

I really don't understand why Firefox mobile doesn't support before ARmV6 device .... whereas it's an open source software ...

(and only Firefox webrowser doesn't support armv6)

Thanks for the link.

[Guest brookergray]

^ this explains the technical difficulties behind it: http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2012/02/17/firefox-mobile-on-armv6-processors-2/

TLDR: it's JavaScript

[Guest mum1989]

Thanks for the info. ;)

[Guest shmizan]

I really don't understand why Firefox mobile doesn't support before ARmV6 device .... whereas it's an open source software ...

it's a future app, why going backwards?

armv6 sucks and it's the distant past by now.. it's like when CyanogenMod was made available only to Gen 2.. moving forward :)

[Guest brookergray]

^ plus armv8 is coming so we are two generations behind.

[Guest tilal6991]

Because 60% of android devices are still arm6.

[Guest mitchde]

Its an huge download!

I am unsure how much bigger (in MB on internal flash) it is compared to standard browser or opera?

[Guest Sulthekk]

It's 15MBs after install, but it stores all cache on data, so it's as large as many sites you visit. I highly recommend to move it to sd as it will take up all the space sooner or later.

[Guest shmizan]

Because 60% of android devices are still arm6.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Requirements

I don't know anyone who has phones from the third part of the list (ARMv6). so from my point of view 0% of android devices are ARMv6. where did you find that data anyway?

[Guest brookergray]

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Requirements

I don't know anyone who has phones from the third part of the list (ARMv6). so from my point of view 0% of android devices are ARMv6. where did you find that data anyway?

It's in the post that I linked above. Everybody in this sub-forum has an armv6 device so that's a start. Than look around in India, Africa, China and you will find much more people with these phones.

Only 1 of my friends have an armv7 device. The other are mostly blades, galaxy minis, aces and an xperia x8. I live in a poor country :D

[Guest Sulthekk]

It's in the post that I linked above. Everybody in this sub-forum has an armv6 device so that's a start. Than look around in India, Africa, China and you will find much more people with these phones.

Only 1 of my friends have an armv7 device. The other are mostly blades, galaxy minis, aces and an xperia x8. I live in a poor country :D

Well, in my family there are two blades, a galaxy s, and a moto defy. That's 50%

In my class, all phones are armv6 I think, but I'm sure I saw a galaxy mini, an ace, an another blade, and I had to install flash on a wildfire s.

[Guest skywave]

Firefox says 60% of android devices are ARMv6, other sources say a whole different story. Fact is that up until last year, almost all the low-budget phones where equipped with ARMv6 devices but that Google is really not supporting ARMv6 anymore, really just try to report a bug about ARMv5 on the android bugtracker, which is still somewhat part of the AOSP source. The folks that added ARMv6 to AOSP were CodeAurora, a project funded by Qualcomm. Qualcomm is now trying to plug the MSM7227A, a complete pin-compatible ARMv7 upgrade to the MSM7227

[Guest shmizan]

in my family it's 1 iPhone, 2 brothers and a father using 3 phones with keys and..... my poor Blade. within my friends: 3 iPhones, 4 Galaxy S2.

that article dates 58% to October last year.. that's 6 months back. also didn't the newest Android 4.0 released in China FIRST? so yeah there are a lot of people everywhere with ARMv6 devices, still, but that ought to change very very quickly.. why would they invest so much resources in developing FF to a historical technology?

[Guest skywave]

in my family it's 1 iPhone, 2 brothers and a father using 3 phones with keys and..... my poor Blade. within my friends: 3 iPhones, 4 Galaxy S2.

that article dates 58% to October last year.. that's 6 months back. also didn't the newest Android 4.0 released in China FIRST? so yeah there are a lot of people everywhere with ARMv6 devices, still, but that ought to change very very quickly.. why would they invest so much resources in developing FF to a historical technology?

In a opensource communities money isn't the key to everything. Besides the ARMv6 thing is mainly a problem regarding propietary libraries eg. no source available of.

In most cases it's just a simple recompile to make it work on ARMv6, there are certain new methods that can be done faster, but that's solvable with a lot of ifdef macro's. Also there is probably already in the main mozilla repo v6 support as there are besides android phones, also embedded boards with a v6 SoC. Raspberry Pi is one for example.

And most of the people working on opensource projects are engineers, not MBA's whose worst nightmare is a phone that lives a day longer than the warranty on it.

[Guest tilal6991]

Well of course. Arm6 will die but only after the blade dies. But that won't happen for some time. As long as there are feature phones there will still be arm6 phones being sold.

[Guest Sulthekk]

Updated first post with new version.

[Guest sej7278]

Updated first post with new version.

doesn't look that hard to compile yourself

[Guest Sulthekk]

doesn't look that hard to compile yourself

Yeah, if I had a usable domething to do it... At the moment my only way to do it is a debian installed on the sdcard of my blade, but that's awfully slow... Recently I had to compile something on it, but it took a hour for 'apt-get install git-core' to run... No way for me to try it again soon in the future...

[Guest sej7278]

Yeah, if I had a usable domething to do it... At the moment my only way to do it is a debian installed on the sdcard of my blade, but that's awfully slow... Recently I had to compile something on it, but it took a hour for 'apt-get install git-core' to run... No way for me to try it again soon in the future...

i'm crazy busy at the moment, but i'll have a look sometime in the next couple of weeks, but by then they may have got the official mozilla arm6 buildbot working hopefully.

[Guest Sulthekk]

i'm crazy busy at the moment, but i'll have a look sometime in the next couple of weeks, but by then they may have got the official mozilla arm6 buildbot working hopefully.

I doubt they set it up in the next few weeks, seems like they are changing things really slow... Also I hope I can get my good ol' T21 up and running again so I can experiment with it.

[Guest shmizan]

offtopic: sej how come you don't accept PMs? some things I've been meaning to ask you

[Guest sej7278]

offtopic: sej how come you don't accept PMs? some things I've been meaning to ask you

as noobs got on my nerves asking for new builds etc. plus i prefer forum posts as then everyone can share.