What's coming in Firefox mobile 2.0

When it comes to the development of Fennec -- Mozilla's mobile Firefox browser -- the Maemo client is a ways ahead of Android, which is still very much in Alpha status. And so we watch the Maemo development to get an idea of where our version likely is headed.

A couple of biggie improvements Mozilla's working on for Fennec 2.0 are Electrolysis -- aka out-of-process content -- and Layers -- aka accelerated rendering. Electrolysis sandboxes things under the hood of the browser so that if a plug-in or page crashes, it doesn't take down the whole app. (Like in Google Chrome, and coming up in the Firefox desktop browser.) It also splits the load between several processes, which should speed things up. As will Layers, which " In addition to the potential of hardware accelerated rendering on mobile devices, Layers also allows Fennec to remove the custom built canvas-tile-cache rendering solution used to achieve decent panning performance and responsiveness." Ah, so.

For more, check out Mark Finkle's blog. [Stark Raving Finkle]

Phil Nickinson