Users of the Firefox browser in Android phones may soon have to live with fewer customization options as Mozilla is leaning more towards improving startup, responsiveness and memory use. Firefox Engineering Director Johnathan Nightingale said that while the browser will still use the Gecko engine, it may ditch XUL in favor of Android's native UI. "It's still early days, so we have a lot of questions to answer. We’re talking with the Add-on SDK team about the best way to support extensions," Nightingale said in a mailing list. XUL is the technology used by many developers in building add-ons for Firefox. While add-ons and customization have been among the attractions for Firefox, they have also been blamed for slowing down the browser. Nightingale said ditching XUL in favor of Android's native UI may reap three benefits:
Faster startup: a native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL-based UI. This means startup times in fractions of a second, versus several seconds for a XUL UI on some phones. Memory use: A native UI will use significantly less memory. Responsiveness - A native UI has the potential for beautiful panning and zooming performance. "Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open web, and this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible," Nightingale said. He said it is too early to determine when this work will be ready for users, although immediate future versions of Firefox will still use XUL, including the new UI for tablets. A separate article on CNET said a fourth potential benefit for using the native UI is saving battery life. "Start-up time is a big deal when comparing Firefox with the built-in browser on Android, especially since Firefox often gets kicked out of memory when not in use, forcing another sluggish load when a person taps a link and needs the browser again," it added. — RSJ, GMA News 
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