Firefox 4 and Flash Player 10.2 on their way to Android soon

Google’s Android operating system might have the very latest in web software soon, as Firefox 4 and Flash Player 10.2 releases for the open platform are imminent.

Firefox 4 to release soon

Firefox 4, whose last beta included the Mozilla Sync feature, is apparently nearing the final version, much like its desktop counterpart. It’s likely that we’ll see one more beta released (possibly a release candidate?) and then the stable final version release, which will make the releases for both the desktop and mobile versions pretty much simultaneous.

Flash Player will arrive soon too!

Adobe Flash Player 10.2 on the other hand won’t be as accessible to most Android owners. Version 10.2, which finally got a full version release for the desktop very recently, adds a lot of hardware acceleration features which would be difficult to port to an OS that suffers from multiple hardware configuration fragmentation. Instead, Flash Player 10.2 will be released first for Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the OS’ tablet optimized variant because of the one common thread between all Honeycomb devices – NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processor. Whether Flash Player 10.2 will make it to current smartphone Android versions like Gingerbread or Froyo, and even the upcoming 2.4 update (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) remains an unanswered question.