And then there's the performance. When we first looked at Firefox for Android in August 2011 (turn the page to read our original review), we found it sluggish. It took around 3 seconds to load on our Samsung Vibrant, and was a relatively large download at 14MB. The update version is larger still, at 17MB, but our first impressions were much improved. Better yet, the browser loaded in less than half the time on our Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, and websites also felt much snappier in use.

In Mozilla's own documentation, it cites faster website panning performance than its predecessor. The latest version of Firefox for Android recorded 20.5fps when panning cnn.com using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich; its predecessor, just 10.2fps. The next closest rival, the Dolphin Browser, managed 14.2fps.

Mozilla has also measured Firefox for Android's canvas rendering performance - using its own Eideticker Canvas Benchmark. It cites a score of 39.3fps in this test, whereas its predecessor scored 13.2fps and the next fastest browser, Opera, 21.6fps. In fact, based on these results, Mozilla says Firefox for Android is now two times faster than the stock Android browser.

Firefox for Android certainly feels significantly faster than the Android browser, and we've been impressed with the apparent performance of this release, but we weren't about to take Mozilla's word for it. We used the independent SunSpider test on our own Sony Ericsson Android Gingerbread handset to measure browsing performance; we recorded 2,880ms using Firefox for Android 14, and 3,383ms using the stock Android browser.

Mozilla has also built Flash and HTML5 support into the browser, making the platform more appealing to web developers and opening up a range of content for playback on your Android smartphone.