Anyone worried about Firefox's penchant for leaving a massive memory footprint when it makes the move to mobile can breathe a little bit easier. The hard optimization tweaks made during Firefox 3's development cycle have paid off: Benchmarks on Nokia's N810 show that the latest Mobile Firefox build is six times faster than the built-in browser, which is actually based on a Firefox 3 alpha. But the coolest stuff is yet to come.

The touchscreen version was already looking pretty solid, but Mozilla plans on doing some real interface innovation to make it easier to punch in URLs and flip between multiple pages. Better still, it'll have full add-on support so you can keep your favorite extensions. The mobile browser space is finally about to get actually exciting. [Ars Technica, Chris Blizzard]

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