Xul

One of the first things I yelled about when we were debating switching to a native Android UI for Firefox was add-on support. Using a XUL-based UI meant add-ons were free. The Mozilla platform has support for add-ons baked right in. Moving to a native UI would surely kill our ability to support add-ons, right? Wrong!

If you’ve developed applications or extensions using the Mozilla platform, you know that there are tons of services and APIs available. We use those same capabilities when building Fennec. However, there are times when the default platform behavior is not desirable on mobile devices. When that happens, we could hack up our own system, or we could re-implement the platform APIs to suit our needs. We try to do the latter.

Designing a portable application to run on many different mobile devices is a challenge. Screen sizes and pixel densities are different making it difficult to create the One Great Layout. In addition, mobile devices can change screen orientation, from portrait to landscape and back again.

The add-on (extension) mechanism built into the Mozilla platform is very powerful. One of the optional features is support for options (preferences) dialogs. As discussed in my last post, Fennec doesn’t like dialogs. In addition, Fennec has a simple, clean preference system. While designing the Fennec Add-ons Manager, we discussed how we would support add-on options. We didn’t want popup dialogs of random and complicated XUL.

So much to do, so little time. My workspace is littered with projects I started but couldn’t find the time to keep going. It’s kinda sad and I do feel guilty.

Recently, we released Fennec Beta 3 for Maemo (Alpha 3 for Windows Mobile is very close). The new release has several internal changes that might be of interest to add-on developers - or people curious as to how the darn thing works.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.11 matches the Firefox 3.0.11 release. For XULRunner developers, most of the changes in 1.9.0.11 are related to security and stability fixes. SQLite was upgraded to version 3.6.7.