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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!

You have probably seen some announcements and read some blog posts about Mozilla’s recent change in direction for Firefox Mobile on Android. We have decided to drop the XUL-based UI and re-build the application using native Android widgets. Here’s some of the rationale, from Johnathan’s newsgroup post:

Firefox Mobile recently hooked up the same performance data telemetry system used by desktop Firefox. If you use the Nightly version of Firefox Mobile, you can start sending anonymous performance data back to Mozilla. We will use this data to improve future versions of Firefox Mobile.

Lots of discussion going on recently about the affect of 6 week development cycles on binary XPCOM components in add-ons. I don’t want to re-hash those discussions, but Daniel Glazman brought up an interesting point in a comment on Wladimir’s post. Wladimir was suggesting binary component developers start moving to js-ctypes. Daniel pointed out that there are two classes of binary XPCOM components:

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.