Firefox for Android: Using the Android Emulator

Firefox for Android, both the XUL and Native versions, currently requires an ARMv7 CPU. We are looking into adding support for ARMv6, but the ARMv7 limitation had one painful drawback: We could not run Firefox on the Android emulator since it only supported ARMv6.

This is no longer true! The latest version of the Android SDK ships with ARMv7 images for the emulator.

Christian Holler (decoder on IRC) was kind enough to make a wiki page with instructions on setting up the emulator with ARMv7 support. As Christian points out, Firefox does not run at top speed in the emulator, but it’s a heck of a lot better than no “desktop” options at all. Oh yeah, the new native Android UI builds have no desktop counterparts, so the emulator is the only way to run those builds on a desktop machine.

Yes! The emulator runs Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). Yes! Fennec needs to support the ActionBar on ICS 🙂

3 Replies to “Firefox for Android: Using the Android Emulator”

  1. Is my link the correct one to the ActionBar bug?
    Also, can this emulator run Flash? I heard that ICS doesn’t have Flash support yet, is that going to happen at all now that Adobe has given up on mobile Flash?

Comments are closed.