https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2009/06/10/introducing-add-on-collections/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/

Please read https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Zombie_compartments and file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi if you cc :kbrosnan I will do my best to forward it to the correct people.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-android-use-permissions-it-requests not sure if the most recent changes made to it for the Beta are live.

For phone users there is a completely rewritten Java based UI. This results in a much faster startup time and we have Flash support. Two of the largest complaints in the market feedback.

No it does not. Addons need to be re-written for mobile. Jetpack/Addon SDK make this process simpler but it still takes some work.

Mobile is the first place where it is trivial to implement due to hardware decoders. Desktop still has the decision to either pay MPEGLA for a license and ship something like libx624 on all platforms or decode using the system installed codecs when present.

Google already has a h.264 license due to YouTube. Apple probably does not pay anything as they control several key patents involved in decoding h.264. Even if they do pay they would get a royalty distribution from MPGLA for their patents that are in the pool.

There is a big difference when you build a browser around a phone and building a browser from the ground up on a diverse set of phones. Our early work on boot2gecko is showing a large difference between running Linux with a Dalvik vm and then a browser with a JS vm and just running Linux with a browser and a JS vm. That being said we are in the middle of a major rewrite of Firefox mobile with a Java front end. See my reply to the grandparent of this thread for details.

We are working on a Java front end for Firefox mobile. Performance on devices that were marginal at running XUL Firefox mobile is much improved. There were a couple design decisions that made Firefox mobile slow to startup. First it was a testbed for Firefox multiprocess work. Secondly shipping as a full NDK app as complex as Firefox could not compete with Java app startup time due to library unpacking. This was exacerbated on phones that had a poor filesystem such as the Galaxy S.

If you want to give the Java native version a try it can be downloaded from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ It will require you to enable installing of non-market apps on your phone.

This is working fairly well on Nightly and Aurora. On Beta (11) soon.

Adding Flash to Firefox was a considerable amount of work. Adobe and Google rather drastically re-wrote NPAPI. The only documentation on how Flash worked on Android is the Android source. This work represents several hundred person hours to get it working.

TBH Flash support is in the current release version has a pref for flash on 2.2 and 2.3 but the experience is rather poor, hence it being disabled with no UI to enable it. about:config change plugin.disable to false. Judge Flash progress against the Nighty or Aurora builds. The Beta 10 or release 10 builds are not representative of the Flash experience for 11+.

Debian tends to have large and historical patches that make large upstream patckages fit the Debain way. For example I'm takling about packages such as OOo/LibreOffice, Apache httpd, Mozilla Firefox, etc. Arch goes in the other direction, make as few changes to the upstream package as possible.

The stock Android browser is not Chrome. It uses Webkit but otherwise the development is completely separate.

The Adobe reader plugin for Mac is a Safari specific plugin. It does not use the standard NPAPI plugin architecture that nearly all other non-IE plugins use.

The dev for pdf-mac stopped updating their code early in the 3.6 release cycle. There is a edit you can do to make the 1.2.0 version run in Firefox 7 but you need to run Firefox in 32 bit mode. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110622163401497

If you are experiencing crashes please provide crash ids. https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Mozilla%20Crash%20Reporter