Firefox for Android: Nightly Channel Switches to Native UI Builds

We have been talking a lot recently about the new native UI version of Firefox for Android. Built using native Android UI widgets, packed with major speed improvements and large memory reductions. We have not been working on the project very long, but we have been making solid progress. We decided itโ€™s time to move the native builds into our nightly delivery channel.

The nightly channel is a snapshot of our very latest development work, before it is ready for widespread testing. This is our least stable update channel, and is not recommended for most users. Nightly will offer to update itself automatically, once a day, with the latest changes. If you have a nightly Firefox installed on your Android device, when it updates on November 23rd, you’ll be running the new native UI build.

The XUL-based version of Firefox had several years of development and the nightly builds have a relatively high level of stability. The new native UI builds are not that mature and you will find some OMGWTFBBQ flaws. We have a quick summary of known issues on the Nightly download page. I’ll call out a few of the big ones here:

  • Sync is not supported yet: Sync is also being refactored for the move to native and isn’t ready yet.
  • Panning and zooming have issues: Pages layout too wide for phones and zooming results in fuzzy content. These are our highest priority items and we are landing improvements everyday.
  • Tablet UI is not ready: We are focused on phones and the tablet UI has not caught up. Tablet UI is not a high priority for the native UI project since we can fallback to shipping the XUL-based version on tablets until we have a solid native tablet UI.
  • Bookmarks and History are saved to the system storage: We save bookmarks and history in the same storage that the stock Android browser uses. It provides tighter integration, but does mean the data is not locked away in a Firefox-only location. Passwords and other data are stored in a Firefox-only location.

If any of these issues make you uncomfortable or you are worried about the changes in stability, we urge you to move to the more stable Aurora channel. The Aurora channel is still the XUL-based Firefox you have been using.

We certainly hope you give the new nightly a chance and help us improve the quality and stability by filing bugs.

Note: If you have been using the native UI builds, especially on a tablet, we recommend uninstalling and re-installing the current nightly.

Firefox for Android: Using the Android Emulator

Firefox for Android, both the XUL and Native versions, currently requires an ARMv7 CPU. We are looking into adding support for ARMv6, but the ARMv7 limitation had one painful drawback: We could not run Firefox on the Android emulator since it only supported ARMv6.

This is no longer true! The latest version of the Android SDK ships with ARMv7 images for the emulator.

Christian Holler (decoder on IRC) was kind enough to make a wiki page with instructions on setting up the emulator with ARMv7 support. As Christian points out, Firefox does not run at top speed in the emulator, but it’s a heck of a lot better than no “desktop” options at all. Oh yeah, the new native Android UI builds have no desktop counterparts, so the emulator is the only way to run those builds on a desktop machine.

Yes! The emulator runs Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). Yes! Fennec needs to support the ActionBar on ICS ๐Ÿ™‚

Firefox Android: Add-ons in a Native World

One of the first things I yelled about when we were debating switching to a native Android UI for Firefox was add-on support. Using a XUL-based UI meant add-ons were free. The Mozilla platform has support for add-ons baked right in. Moving to a native UI would surely kill our ability to support add-ons, right? Wrong!

Add-ons are an important part of the Firefox story. Native UI builds of Firefox support add-ons. There are some things an add-on developer needs to be aware:

  • The add-ons system is the same one used in other Mozilla applications. We did not invent a new add-on system.
  • Native UI builds are considered a new application and are not add-on compatible with the XUL versions. The application ID for native UI builds is: {aa3c5121-dab2-40e2-81ca-7ea25febc110}
  • There is no visible XUL in the UI, so using overlays to try to add or change UI is useless.
  • There is a simple NativeWindow object that allows you to manipulate parts of the native Android UI.
  • Services like nsIPromptService and nsIAlertsService are implemented to use native Android UI.
  • Since overlays are useless for UI and JavaScript APIs are available for native UI, you should seriously consider just making a restartless add-on.

NativeWindow

We wanted to give add-on developers some APIs to manipulate the native Android UI, so we create a helper object called NativeWindow. The API is still young, but it gives you access to: Android Menu, Doorhanger Notifications, Context Menus (in web content) and Android popup toast alerts. The object is currently part of the main browser window, but we are considering moving it to a JS module. The basic API is here:


/*
 label: menu label
 icon: file:// or data: URI for an icon
 callback: JS function called when menu is tapped
 returns a menu ID that can be used to remove the menu
*/
menuID = NativeWindow.menu.add(label, icon, callback);
NativeWindow.menu.remove(menuID);

/*
 message: displayed text
 value: string based tag
 buttons: array of JS objects used to create buttons in the notification
 tabID: tab associated with this notification
 options: JS object that has 'persistence' and 'timeout' options
*/
NativeWindow.doorhanger.show(message, value, buttons, tabID, options);
NativeWindow.doorhanger.hide(value, tabID);

/*
 label: menu label
 selector: JS object that has a 'matches(element)' function. Used to show the menu.
 callback: JS function called when menu is tapped
 returns a menu ID that can be used to remove the menu
*/
menuID = NativeWindow.contextmenu.add(label, selector, callback);
NativeWindow.contextmenu.add(menuID);

/*
 message: displayed text
 duration: "short" or "long"; Used for alert timeout
*/
NativeWindow.toast.show(message, duration);

Some examples of what the API can do:

Doorhanger Notification


Menu Item


Context Menu Item


Toast Popup Alert


The NativeWindow API will continue to grow and mature, but I think even now it shows that add-ons can have first-class interactions with the native UI of Firefox. I am looking forward to developers trying it out and helping us push the API forward.

Firefox for Android: Native Android UI

You have probably seen some announcements and read some blog posts about Mozilla’s recent change in direction for Firefox Mobile on Android. We have decided to drop the XUL-based UI and re-build the application using native Android widgets. Here’s some of the rationale, from Johnathan’s newsgroup post:

  • Startup – A native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL based UI, since it can happen in parallel with Gecko startup. This means startup times in fractions of a second, versus several seconds for a XUL UI on some phones.
  • Memory Use – We believe a native UI will use significantly less memory.
  • Responsiveness – A native UI has the potential for beautiful panning and zooming performance.

Another major change is a move away from multi-process architecture (e10s) as well. The web content process was great for stabiilty, keeping crashes from taking down the entire application, but it also increased our memory usage and created some performance issues. In the new application, Gecko is running in a separate thread, not a separate process.

Quite simply everything you see is a native Android widget. Even the web content is displayed in a native view, very similar to the multi-process layers system we previously used. This allows us to asynchronously pan and zoom the web content, without waiting for the browser to scroll or zoom the actual content.

Even though the UI is completely implemented in native widgets, there is still a lot of JavaScript around, it’s just not visible. JavaScript is the perfect binding language into the Gecko platform and we are still using it for many of the same tasks. If you have ever built a browser using XUL, take a look at the browser,js file and you will see some familiar code. Because we have such a strong JavaScript binding layer, we can support add-ons in much the same way as a XUL-based application. More on that in a future blog post.

A few more details on how these three systems interact can be found in this basic architecture document. There is some details on the simple messaging system we use to allow the JavaScript and Java systems to communicate too.

The current nightlies are very usable, and support Flash (yes they do!) – so go grab the APK and try it out yourself.