Chrome and latest Firefox for Android both go stable

On Tuesday, the latest version of Firefox for Android was released, with new features including Flash support (at last!), a new UI featuring Australis tabs (an upcoming change in desktop Firefox) and a hefty increase in speed, making Firefox look like a very competitive Android browser.

Yesterday though, at Google's I/O conference, besides the announcement of Android 4.1 'Jelly Bean', the Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus Q streaming device, the first stable version of Chrome for Android was released, with the familiar sleek UI and fantastic integration with chrome for the desktop.

Both are now available on the Play Store (Firefox, Chrome) - this calls for a face-off!

Tabs

Firefox gives a small Australis-style box with a tab counter to the right of the address bar. When pressed, this reveals a neat list of tabs with thumbnails and close buttons. In Chrome, the process is a little more flashy - tabs are shown as stacked-up screenshots, scrolling up and down slides the tabs over one another, and a side-swipe will close a tab with a fancy animation.

Firefox

Chrome

Australis Tabs

Speed

I ran a test on my HTC One V with both browsers using Peacekeeper, a universal browser test. Despite  Mozilla's claims that the new Firefox is considerably faster than the other major Android browsers (based on canvas rendering), Chrome was actually faster in every area - in some cases twice as fast. Chrome even won out in HTML5 canvas rendering. The only area in which Firefox was superior was HTML5 video codec support. The overall scores were Firefox 179-276 Chrome.

Bookmark Syncing

Both browsers offer a bookmark syncing service so that you can access all your bookmarks on your Android device. With Chrome this was very simple to set up - as expected you are asked to sign in to Chrome with your Gmail account and your bookmarks sync straight away. With Firefox this involved a bit more fuss - you have to manually pair your device with an account created on your desktop, by plugging a code from Android Firefox into the settings of desktop Firefox. Not too tricky, but you need to be at your desktop to get it set up.

The Verdict

While Firefox definitely feels more finished, there are still a few glitches in Chrome which I'm sure Google will iron out soon enough. Due to its speed and the seamless integration with its bigger brother on the desktop, I'll be using Chrome from now on, but both are superb browsers and I definitely recommend giving both a try to see what's right for you.