There used to be experimental versions up till early last year. They were larger, slower and had stability problems that do not exist on ARMv7 devices. The ARMv6 also does not support the Thumb-2 instruction set as it is a feature of ARMv7 processors which makes the code both smaller and faster.

The ZTE Blade came out back in September 2010 so it is not that new. It has a Qualcomm MSM7227 cpu which I have seen quite often budget phones phones. It is also in the lower price range which makes ARMv6 cpus more common.

Actually, it's a ZTE Libra (I'm sorry, becaus it has another brand on it).

My phone is brand new! And even for the others, September 2010 isn't old, is it?

But if I understand, there are limitations on the processor that ship with budget phones. So, it's also a price issue. If you buy a 400 euro phone, it will have FF, but not with a 100 euro one. This doesn't seem to be the spirit of Firefox and open source software...

Anyway, thank you for the answer.

Well they have said that once the code for mobile Firefox gets smaller and faster that they may then tackle the ARMv6 cpus in trying to see if they can get a usable browser despite the ARMv6 cpu's limitations.

Well I have seen even phones that were not considered budget phone or but mid-range or up still occasionally had a ARMv6 type of cpu instead of ARMv7 up till oh mid way last 2011. Tablets have seemed to faired better over the year as even budget ones can have a ARMv7 cpu like a Rockchip RK2918.

Yes the ZTE Libra is newer as it was announced in February2011 and then released in September 2011. Despite being released a year later, it still had the 600 MHz ARM 11 Qualcomm MSM7227 that the ZTE Blade has.

There was a great article back in fall last year but forgot to bookmark it and have yet to find it again oddly. It discussed about the budget devices that were quite common in some places, especially phones that usually had a ARMv6 and the difficulty of getting Android apps like mobile Firefox to run well on them even if they have decent screen size/resolution and 512+MB Ram and Android 2.1+.

"Well they have said that once the code for mobile Firefox gets smaller and faster that they may then tackle the ARMv6 cpus in trying to see if they can get a usable browser despite the ARMv6 cpu's limitations."

That would be nice, because there are still many quite new phones using ARMv6 out there, like you said.

Well, I'm not angry with Mozilla anymore. I will still bet on Firefox!

Thank you very much for your helpful answer!

There actually was a report filed in Bugzilla tracker not long ago in looking to try and support ARMv6 cpu (as long as the users device has enough ram and resolution to make it worthwhile).

For reading as Bugzilla is not a discussion forum. (Bugzilla etiquette)

Bug 697205 - (armv6) Get ARMv6 builds working again

This one attached to Bug 697205 shows some of the difficulty in supporting ARMv6.

Bug 701708 - Sort out STLport arm vs. thumb issues for armv6 builds