Mozilla

The latest Firefox Mobile Aurora 7 release has many of the same great features as Firefox Desktop Aurora 7. The new memory optimizations make running Firefox on Android much more pleasant, with fewer browser session restarts.

A long time ago, in May 2008, I posted about a remote JS shell add-on I was building. I had been tinkering with a few existing projects (JSSH, SD Connect and MozRepl) but wanted to build something small, lightweight and mainly focused on helping add-on / XUL developers interact with JS running in a separate application. I tried to get the protocol closer to that used by Opera DragonFly and Crossfire, but I never had the time to get it exactly right. When I started work on Firefox Mobile, I used the add-on to interact with Firefox running on a mobile device from my desktop machine. Unfortunately, I never felt the UI and the code were good enough for a public release.

I mentioned that Firefox for Mobile (codenamed Fennec) has adopted the same rapid release system as used for development of desktop Firefox. The new system creates four (4) channels, each with possible releases: Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Final. With Fennec, you can have all four channels installed on your device at the same time. The installs do not share any files or data - they are completely isolated from each other.

By now you are probably aware that desktop Firefox has moved to a rapid release system, utilizing several new code repositories and a focused strategy for creating releases in a timely manner.

I updated Zippity, our crowd sourcing data collection system, to add support for memory and CPU data telemetry. What is memory and CPU data telemetry you ask? Basically, we send data about the current Firefox Mobile memory and CPU usage patterns to Zippity. There are two ways to send the data:

I just added support to Mobile Tools for monitoring HTTP headers in Firefox Mobile. I just wanted a way to look at some HTTP traffic to help debug some mobile websites. Screen space is limited on mobile devices, so we don’t get to have nice floating panels like in desktop Firefox’s web console or Firebug. Instead I opted for a slide out panel:

Recently, Google released the beginnings of a cloud-based printing system called - Google Cloud Print. The project is still in Beta, but you can install a recent version of Google Chrome on Windows and attach your local printers into the Cloud Print system (more). Google has added support for Cloud Print to few of their mobile web apps, but has not released a client application API yet. However, they did release a simple webapp demo - and where there is a demo, there are people reverse engineering it.