Posts Tagged ‘mozilla’

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Health of the web and mobile site redirections

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Even when targeting just the iPhone, redirecting to mobile-friendly sites is already causing problems for the web. This will only get worse as sites begin to detect user agents for other mobile browsers. We are headed towards a fragmented internet, where desktop sites and mobile sites live in independent ecosystems and movement between them is fragile and perilous.

What is a good solution for this problem? Don’t say user agents. Peeking at user agents is so last decade. Media queries are part of the answer, but mobile phones have limited screen space and performance is crucial. There’s a lot of content that is best to not even load. How do web developers detect these performance-sensitive environments and react accordingly?

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Make your Fennec RC1 fast again

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

If you are using RC1 on the N900, do yourself a favor and turn off disk caching. Set the preference “browser.cache.disk.enable” to false:

  1. Navigate to “about:config”.
  2. In the Filter field, type in “disk” to narrow the results down.
  3. Carefully tap the one that says “browser.cache.disk.enable” and press Enter on your keyboard. The preference should become bold.
  4. Restart your browser.

Sometime after beta 5, we’ve known that there was a regression with loading pages. After releasing RC1, our fellow hacker Doug solved the mystery: in beta 5, Firefox’s disk cache had effectively been turned off for the N900. We “fixed” the problem in RC1 and caused a major regression in page loading performance. Here’s the bug if you want to track it.

This is a band-aid solution for 1.0. Ultimately we want disk caching to happen outside of the main thread so that Firefox stays snappy during page load.

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Windows Mobile and the open web

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Could the mobile web save Windows mobile, by providing users with most of the applications every other platform has? Gruber:

That might actually be true, and it actually gives them a chance — if they were either able to produce a WebKit-caliber mobile browser or willing simply to adopt WebKit themselves. A big if, but at least that’s possible.

The “if” is not as big as that: there is already browser competition on WinMo, and some of the browsers are already standards compliant and HTML5 ready. As a shameless plug, we have an alpha out there that stands up pretty well.

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Following mobile Firefox nightly builds

Monday, November 16th, 2009

The super easy way for N900 owners. For extension developers or users who would like to keep up with the latest and greatest copies of Mobile Firefox, Joel Maher is graciously hosting a debian repository (UPDATE: an official repository is now available–URL has been changed from Joel’s to official):

  1. In MicroB, the default browser, navigate to http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/repos/1.9.2_multi/1.9.2_multi_nightly.install (short url: http://bit.ly/6ccalh).
  2. You will be asked to add the catalog, which has the nightly packages needed. Click Add.
  3. “fennec” will now be available as a package in the application manager from the “Download” menu. Install it.
  4. Watch for the yellow exclamation mark in your notification area every morning, or whenever you feel like it. Your software updates will include fennec now (you will also see entries for “xulrunner”–Fennec depends on this, so install it too).

We could definitely use your help testing as we grind towards our 1.0 release. If you have any thoughts or find a bug, please ping us on IRC (irc.mozilla.org, channel #mobile) or file a bug.

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Firefox on the N900 video

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

The demo is hard to see because of screen glare, but our UX designer Madhava goes into some detail about the design decisions that went into making Firefox for a mobile phone. One of our big challenges is how to optimize the use of screen space:

For the small screen problem, one of the things we do is when you start to use a page, the controls you don’t need anymore pan off the top of the screen…just by using the page, UI you don’t need goes away.

Uniquely, mobile Firefox takes this one further step by spatially relating browser controls with the page, similar to the URL bar at the top of the page. Controls can be found off the left or right of web content with a quick flick.

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