The future of Firefox for Android

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Mozilla is working on a new mobile browser for Android called Fenix. The new browser is available as a development build currently.

The current Firefox for Android is also available but Mozilla focuses development resources on the new Fenix browser; that's the main reason why recent Firefox for Android releases look more like extended support releases that fix bugs but don't introduce a whole lot of new features in the browser.

While it was clear for some time that Mozilla planed to replace the current Firefox for Android with the new Fenix browser, it was unclear how all of that would happen.

Questions that we had no answers for included for how long the legacy Firefox for Android would be supported, when we could expect a first stable release of Fenix, and how Mozilla planed to migrate users from the old mobile browser to the new.

Firefox for Android future

A recently published support document highlights Mozilla's plans for the current Firefox for Android and also Fenix.

Mozilla's main idea is to maintain the legacy version of Firefox for Android until Fenix reaches migration readiness status. Firefox users on Android should be able to use the legacy version until Fenix is ready while Mozilla wants to minimize support costs.

To achieve that goal, Firefox for Android will move to the ESR branch after the release of Firefox 68. In other words: there won't be a Firefox 69 for Android that is based on the legacy version as it will use ESR versioning instead.

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