Mozilla plans Firefox for Android with native UI

BANAGLORE, INDIA: Developer's at Mozilla are planning to build future versions of Firefox on Android platform with a native UI instead of the current XUL implementation.

The development team at Mozilla expects a change in native user interface will use significantly less memory and to offer faster than the XUL-based version.

Announcing on a blog post, Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering, wrote, "The team is already working on this project on the birch branch, and we are tracking the early work on the wiki. To be clear, we're still building on Gecko. This change is just about the way we build our UI."

Elaborating on the functionality of the UI,  Nightingale said, 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 further added that, we're talking with the Add-on SDK team about the best way to support extensions.

It's too early for us to determine when this work will be ready for users, but we are certain that it will not impact the versions currently on the Beta and Aurora channels, Nightingale added.

He further added that Firefox 8 and 9 will ship with the XUL UI, including the new UI for tablets, while they build the native UI.