Firefox for Android: After the Reboot

I was asked to give a presentation on the recent developments in Firefox Mobile for the Mozilla Vision 2012 conference in Tokyo. It gave me a chance to reflect a bit on what we did, why we did it and how things are going. The “what” in this case is rewriting the UI for Firefox Mobile using native Android widgets. The “why” can be summed up in the following goals:

  • Faster start-up time
  • Support for Flash
  • Use less memory

We have been fairly “heads down” working on native Firefox for Android over the last 3 months. Re-writes are scary. It’s a race to re-implement existing functionality while adding all new bugs. We are finally to the point in the project where things are settling down. We are focused on stability issues, getting ready to release the native version to a larger audience. As for the primary goals, we have good news:

  • Start-up time is many times faster than the XUL version. Launching via the icon is almost instantaneous.
  • Flash is supported on Froyo and Gingerbread. We need to reverse engineer the changes made for Honeycomb and ICS. There is no documentation for this work.
  • With a single-process, we have reduced memory quite a bit. We still can get killed in the background by Android – it’s supposed to do this – but when this happens, we start up very quickly and restore your session.
  • We still support add-ons using the native UI!

I’m looking forward to being able to move forward again, designing/implementing new features on a solid foundation. We have plenty of new experiments and projects waiting to move forward.

Mozilla Vision 2012 was a great conference and very well attended. I’m very glad I had the chance to participate. Here is the link to my Google Docs presentation. It has a bit more details.

… and go grab a Nightly and see the changes for yourself!