Firefox for Android has undergone significant upgrades in the past few months as Mozilla tries to claw back some market share from Chrome. The last major upgrade was incorporating your Firefox desktop add-ons and extensions into the mobile version, and they are now back with another quality-of-life improvement.
Version 108 of the browser is now live for smartphones, with a number of improvements, the significant one being the ability to save webpages in PDF format for offline viewing. Printing documents might be going out of style, but there are times having an offline copy available on your smartphone can come in handy, especially when using a resource that you are not sure will be available in the future, or might change with time.
Chrome already allows you to save a webpage as a PDF in both their mobile and desktop versions. However, one thing Firefox does differently is allowing you to save the webpage in a ‘simplified view’ that is easy to go through in those cases you only need the text in an easy-to-read format.
To get started on transforming your webpages into PDF format on Firefox for Android;
- Open the page you want to save
- Tap the three dots button in the toolbar
- Select the share icon at the bottom
- Click on the ‘Save as PDF’ option
- The page you are viewing will then be saved in your downloads folder
Another addition that comes with Firefox version 108 is the ability to open all the bookmarks within a folder at once in either new tabs or new private tabs. To do so, head over to the Bookmarks option within the menu, then select the three-dot menu next to the folder. You will then be presented with two options, ‘Open all in new tabs’ or ‘Open all in recent tabs’
These recent additions and improvements made to Firefox for Android will hopefully make it a worthy alternative to Chrome in due time. However, there are a few needed additions that still need to be made including the ability to pull to refresh which saves so much time and is intuitive, especially when viewing dynamic content such as comments on a forum that are continuously added.
