Posts

2011
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.
I just put together a simple restartless add-on, Cloud Viewer, that integrates the Google Docs Viewer into Firefox Mobile. I saw a few similar add-ons on AMO for desktop Firefox, but none for Firefox Mobile. Opera and Dolphin also have add-ons integrating support for online document viewers.
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: