Author: Mark Finkle

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Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo

Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo is ready to install. For this release, the focus was some UI features we didn’t have time to put in the initial release. We are also using your feedback from previous releases and nightly builds to help improve the browsing experience.

Some of the bigger features include:

  • Form assistant improvements, including autocomplete
  • Start Page redesign
  • Auto update add-ons
  • Portrait support on N900
  • Context Menu with Open Link in New Tab and Save Image
  • Web content theme update
  • Manage site preferences (clearing passwords and others)
  • Improved Site Menu
  • Use volume keys to zoom on N900
  • Save page to PDF

As always, we’ve provided unbranded Fennec desktop builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can use these if you don’t have a Maemo device or to aid in add-on development. Add-on developers should use this release to update add-ons from Firefox 1.0.x for Maemo.

Note to Ovi Store Customers: If you installed Firefox 1.0 from the Ovi Store, you will not be able to upgrade to Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 (either from the N900 Application Manager or by downloading the software from Mozilla). We are working to solve this for future releases so that anyone can participate in our Beta programs. Don’t worry, though, if you got Firefox 1.0 from either the Ovi store or directly from Mozilla, you will be updated to Firefox 1.1 (final) when it is released.

We want to get as much feedback as possible before moving to a final release candidate, so please leave comments or file bugs.

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Firefox Mobile 1.1 Beta 1 and Add-ons

With Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo ready to go and the final release not far away, now is an excellent time for add-on developers to update their add-ons. Obviously, Mozilla wants as many add-ons as possible to be compatible with the latest version of Firefox Mobile.

AMO (addons.mozilla.org) is ready for add-ons to set maxVersion to 1.1.*

Please test your add-on before bumping the version. You can use the nightly builds for Maemo, as well as the desktop versions to help test. Here are a few things to keep in mind while testing add-ons:

  • Site Menu: The site menu was redesigned and uses different XUL and JS. If your add-on adds a command to the site menu, please check out the changes and update your code.
  • Context Menu: Long taps (or right clicks on desktop) will display a context menu, but only limited targets are allowed (images, links and mailto: links). If your add-on can benefit form the context menu, use it. But use it wisely.
  • Startup: When starting the browser, the Awesomebar Screen is no longer shown. A true Start Page system is now used. Adjust your add-on startup process if needed.
  • Portrait Mode: Firefox for Maemo (and Android) now supports dynamic portrait/landscape orientation. Make sure your add-on works well in both orientations.
  • Theme Breakage: Check to make sure the add-on is not including the chrome://global/content/global.css stylesheet. It will break the mobile platform CSS. An easy way to see this breakage is to look at the toggle buttons in Preferences UI. If those buttons look like checkboxes, the CSS is broken. This seems to be very common for new add-ons.
  • Check for Errors: When testing the add-on, launch the browser from a terminal and use | fennec –jsconsole | to open the JS Error Console. Make sure no errors appear in the console while testing the add-on.

If you have any questions, please use Mozilla IRC and join the #mobile channel. Use mibbit if you don’t have an IRC client. I’ll be there (mfinkle), as will many other helpful people who can help answer your questions.

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Fennec 1.1 Context Menus

Fennec 1.1 now supports context menus. Using a long tap (aka tap-n-hold), or right-click on desktop versions, you can get a context menu to appear.

We intentional designed the context menu system to be simple and minimalistic. We do not want large context menus with many, many commands. Currently, context menus are only displayed if the user long-taps on a link or an image. Technically, not all links will activate the context menu. javascript: links, for example will not activate the context menu.

Fennec 1.1 will only ship with two context menu commands: Open Link in New Tab and Save Image.

Add-ons can extend the context menu. Just overlay the context menu list of commands, which is in the XUL. Each command must have a type attribute and only 3 types are recognized: link, image, mailto.

The context menu system will automatically show/hide commands based on where the user long-taps. Under normal circumstances, the add-on will not need to worry about showing or hiding the context menu command:

  • If an image is tapped, only type="image" commands will be shown.
  • If the element is an image inside a link, both types of commands will be shown.
  • If no link or image is picked, no context menu will be shown at all.

Yes, this is a bit restrictive, but that’s the way we want context menus to work for now. Feedback is always appreciated and Mozilla IRC (#mobile channel) is available to help answer questions.

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Firefox Mobile 1.1 – What’s Coming

The Mobile Team has been hard at work on the 1.1 release of Firefox Mobile. This release will mainly be a Nokia Maemo release, but the current Android builds are based on the same front-end.

For the 1.1 release, we are focusing on some UI features we didn’t have time to put in the initial release. We are also using your feedback to help improve the browsing experience. You can see the list of planned features on the planning page. As you can see, we have completed much of the work and the beta release is quickly approaching.

Some of the bigger features that have already landed include:

  • Form assistant improvements, including autocomplete
  • Start page redesign
  • Auto update add-ons
  • Portrait support on N900
  • Context Menu with Open in New Tab and Save Image
  • Web content theme update
  • Manage site preferences (clearing passwords and others)
  • Clean up site menu
  • Use volume keys to zoom on N900
  • Save page to PDF

Screen shots of the some new features:

Form Assistant with Autocomplete:

Start Page:

Context Menu:

Page Menu:

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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.

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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.

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XULRunner 1.9.0.x Releases – The End is Near

Mozilla is currently, building and releasing XULRunner simultaneously with Firefox releases. Releases can be found here.

XULRunner releases for 1.9.0, 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 branches (matching Firefox 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6 respectively) are available. The question now becomes “How long does Mozilla keep releasing older branches of XULRunner?” We’d like to re-purpose some of the resources used to build older branches.

Therefore, we intend to stop posting XULRunner builds and releases from the 1.9.0.x branch soon. This would only affect Mozilla building and releasing XULRunner 1.9.0.x. The source code to XULRunner 1.9.0.x would remain available and developers could always build and release their own XULRunner packages from the source code.

Security updates and fixes may still happen on the 1.9.0 branch. If you depend on the 1.9.0 branch and want to get these fixes into your project, you’ll need to build XULRunner yourself.

Mozilla will continue to build and release XULRunner from the 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 branches.

Please feel free to provide feedback on the pros and cons. We’d be interested in knowing how this action affects users of prebuilt XULRunner releases. Follow up on the newsgroup posting.

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Perils of the viewport meta tag

Apple introduced the viewport meta tag in mobile Safari to help web developers improve the presentation of there web pages on the iPhone. We added support for the viewport tag in mobile Firefox for the same reasons.

The viewport tag allows web developers to set the width, height and scale of the browser area used to display web content. However, some websites are not doing a good job configuring the viewport tag and it affects the presentation in Firefox.

When setting the width or height, developers can use a fixed number of pixels or use the constants: device-width and device-height. The iPhone is 320px wide in portrait and 480px wide in landscape. Other devices have different screen sizes. It seems the “width=320” is a popular fallback though. See how Facebook and DeviantART display in Firefox on the N900 (480px in portrait and 800px in landscape):

touch.facebook.com
fennec-viewport-facebook

deviantart.com
fennec-viewport-deviantart

Don’t get me wrong. I like “touch-friendly” web pages on my mobile device. However, the iPhone is not the only mobile device out there. If a web developer has gone through the effort to make a “touch-friendly” web page, please configure your viewport to work in other devices. It’s easy!

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Add-ons and Restarts – Yuck!

There has been a lot of discussion about the future of the Mozilla add-on infrastructure. I think it’s clear now that Mozilla is not removing the classic add-on mechanism. In fact, Fabrice Desré found a nice bit of news on an upcoming feature (via comments on Atul’s post):

Fabrice: Does the fact that jetpacks are now XPIs mean that the “no restart after install” feature will be implemented for traditionnal add-ons ?

Atul: That’s correct! We don’t have a bug filed for it yet, still need to do that, but the idea is that if an extension includes certain metadata in its install.rdf that essentially tells Firefox “look, I know how to unload all my resources reliably”, then Firefox will trust it and call a certain function whenever the extension needs to unload itself.

Mossop: I’ll just elaborate a little. Plans are naturally in flux right now but the idea is to allow XPI packages to install without restarts if they wish, however there will be constraints. They will be responsible for doing everything themselves, which means (at least in my head right now) we won’t automatically load chrome or components from these extensions. Instead we will just do startup and shutdown calls into the extension and allow it to register/unregister what it needs by itself. This means that just marking an existing extension to work without restarts wouldn’t get you anywhere, you still need to do the extra work to handle the startup/shutdown parts.

This is great news for add-on developers! I’m sure MDC will have some code snippets for dynamically loading chrome overlays and components to make it easy to support no-restart add-ons.