FOSDEM 2010 and Fennec Project Update

I was lucky enough to be able to attend FOSDEM 2010. It was my 3rd FOSDEM and I had a blast. I was able to catch a few good talks outside the Mozilla DevRoom, including one of the keynotes. Inside the Mozilla DevRoom, we had a lot of interesting talks from lots of different people and projects. Thanks to everyone who made FOSDEM such a great experience!

I was part of a talk on Firefox Mobile (Fennec). We had about 75 minutes for the talk, so I successfully recruited Vivien Nicolas and Fabrice Desré (two other mobile developers) to help with the presentation. We tried to cover many different topics during the presentation:

  • The thought process for porting to a platform
  • How porting affects the Mozilla platform
  • Designing a touch-friendly UI
  • How you can use add-ons to extend the mobile browsing experience
  • Tips and tricks for great mobile UIs and fast code
  • The roadmap for Firefox Mobile -> 1.1 and 2.0

I am planning a few more blog posts to discuss the Firefox Mobile roadmap soon.

Firefox for Mobile – Keyboard Shortcuts

Not every mobile device has a physical keyboard, but many do. Firefox Mobile supports a handful of keyboard shortcuts that might make your life a little easier:

  • Zoom in: Ctrl+Up arrow
  • Zoom out: Ctrl+Down arrow
  • Go to Location Bar: Ctrl+L
  • Back one page: Ctrl+Left arrow or Backspace
  • Forward one page: Ctrl+Right arrow or Shift+Backspace
  • New tab: Ctrl+T
  • Close tab: Ctrl+W
  • Open link in new tab: Ctrl+Tap on link

For a more complete list of keyboard shortcuts, and lots of other useful information, go to the Firefox Mobile support knowledge base.