Mozilla launched the latest version of its Firefox browser for Android and desktop today. While the desktop version gets its fair share of minor updates and now sets all plug-ins with the exception of recent Flash versions as “click to play,” the Android version is getting some time in the spotlight.
Firefox for Android now features a brand-new homescreen that aims to provide users with easier access to the sites they visit most often, browsing history and bookmarks, as well as Firefox’s Reading List feature for distraction-free reading.
This new homescreen, Mozilla says, is meant to “give you a streamlined and speedier browsing experience on-the-go, when you need it most.” It made its first appearance in the beta channel in late October and the feedback must have been god, because Mozilla graduated it to the stable channel pretty quickly. It’s available in both the phone and tablet interface.
With this update, Firefox also now gives its mobile users the option to choose Bing and Yahoo for search. Until now, mobile Firefox users had to use Google (which still provides the Mozilla Foundation with the vast majority of its income). It’s unclear if Mozilla has struck any deals with Yahoo or Microsoft for a similar profit-sharing agreement.
On the desktop side, things aren’t quite as interesting. Plug-ins are now all ‘click to play,’ with the exception of Flash, and users who are still on Windows XP get support for MP3 decoding (which means Firefox now supports this on every version of Windows).
The new versions for mobile and desktop also sport the usual tweaks to Firefox’s developer tools and a slew of bug fixes. You can find a detailed rundown of those here.