Mobile

A few weeks ago I posted about Zippity, a way for anyone to help collect performance data for Firefox Mobile. Data has been coming in and so has some feedback. I added some features to the Test Harness add-on to make it easier to use and collect some new types of data. Here’s a list of changes:

If you’re serious about improving your application’s performance, you need to collect data. At Mozilla, we use Talos. The Mobile team has been using Talos to track performance on Maemo (using N810 and N900) devices for a few years and recently started tracking Android (using Tegras) as well. Here are a few of the metrics we track:

We just released Firefox 4 for Mobile (Beta 5) and it’s packed with some noticeable improvements. The primary objectives of Beta 5 were improvements in general performance, reducing memory usage and improving rendering while loading and panning the web content. Here are some results to show the progress that’s been made.

I saw a neat technique in Bug 564675 for creating default preferences in bootstrapped add-ons. Edward Lee posted a link to some code he uses for a bootstrapped add-on. Essentailly, the default preference branch is writable, but not permanent. This is a good thing for bootstrapped add-ons. The add-on should write it’s default preferences every time it loads and the preferences disappear when the session ends. The code looks like:

After playing around with bootstrap (restartless) add-ons a bit more, I came to the point where I needed some extra resources in the add-on. For images, I could have stuck with the data: URI approach I mentioned previously, but I also wanted to add an options UI for my add-on. Turns out it was pretty simple. Thanks to Vlad for getting the ball rolling.

Just an update for add-on developers who are targeting Firefox Mobile. AMO (addons.mozilla.org) is ready for you to bump MaxVersion to “4.0b4”

Last week we were talking about the need for [private browsing](http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Private Browsing), or something like it, in Firefox Mobile. Even though you might not share your phone with other people, you might share a tablet - especially the “family tablet”, sitting there on the coffee table. Private browsing is an obtrusive system, at least as implemented in Mozilla, and it’s doubtful we could add it for Firefox Mobile in time for the upcoming release. Also, private browsing doesn’t really satisfy the sharing use case for tablets.