Mobile

Firefox 31 for Android is the first release where we collect telemetry data on user interactions. We created a simple “event” and “session” system, built on top of the current telemetry system that has been shipping in Firefox for many releases. The existing telemetry system is focused more on the platform features and tracking how various components are behaving in the wild. The new system is really focused on how people are interacting with the application itself.

Firefox for Android Nightly builds now support casting HTML5 videos from a web page to a TV via a connected Roku streaming player. Using the system is simple, but it does require you to install a viewer application on your Roku device. Firefox support for the Roku viewer and the viewer itself are both currently pre-release. We’re excited to invite our Nightly channel users to help us test these new features, share feedback and file any bugs so we can continue to make improvements to performance and functionality.

Millions of people use Firefox for Android every day. It’s amazing to work on a product used by so many people. Unsurprisingly, some of those people send us feedback. We even have a simple system built into the application to make it easy to do. We have various systems to scan the feedback and look for trends. Sometimes, we even manually dig through the feedback for a given day. It takes time. There is a lot.

One of the common types of feedback we get about Firefox for Android is that it’s slow. Other browsers get the same feedback and it’s an ongoing struggle. I mean, is anything ever really fast enough?

Firefox for Android is a great browser, bringing a modern HTML rendering engine to Android 2.2 and newer. One of the things we have been hoping to do for a long time now is make it possible for other Android applications to embed the Gecko rendering engine. Over the last few months we started a side project to make this possible. We call it GeckoView.

Last week, the Firefox for Android team, and some friends, had a team meetup at the Mozilla Toronto office. As is typical for Mozilla, the team is quite distributed so getting together, face to face, is refreshing. The agenda for the week was fairly simple: Brainstorm new feature ideas, discuss ways to make our workflow better, and provide some time for fun hacking.

If you want to stay up to date on any new developments in Firefox for Android (Fennec), check out the new Tumblr and Twitter stream. Lots of updates on what’s landing in Fennec Nightly, tips and tricks and summaries of the Mobile Engineering Team meetings.