blog.pavlov.net » Mozilla

Firefox for Maemo 1.1

pavlov — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:46:11 +0000

We’re pleased to announce Firefox for Maemo 1.1 is now available. Users already running Firefox for Maemo will receive a software update shortly. Our focus for this release was to improve the user experience of Firefox and to make the browser easier to use. This release builds on our 1.0 release which introduced add-ons, such as Firefox Sync and AdBlock Plus, to the mobile browser.

Some of the bigger features include:

Portrait mode upon rotate
New smart-tapping system that makes clicking on links, fields, and buttons easier
Form assistant improvements, including autocomplete
Redesigned start page
Automatically updated add-ons
Open links in a new tab and save images via our new context menus
New web content theme for website forms
Improved Site Menu
Use volume keys to zoom
Save page to PDF
Built in Crash Reporter

Firefox is currently supported on Nokia’s Maemo5 platform and is available for download. To learn more visit Firefox.com/mobile or the FAQ.

Nightly Android Builds

pavlov — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:22:02 +0000

Our automated build machines have just started producing pre-alpha Fennec for Android builds with the latest changes from developers each night. We have similar builds for the desktop version of Firefox and for the N900 to let testers have a way of getting the latest changes to provide feedback and report bugs. There are many changes that go in to each build, causing quality to vary some from day to day, but we’re always working to improve and stabilize the builds.

As of today the builds are still pre-alpha quality, but they’ll continue to improve over time. There are many exciting changes being actively worked on that will be showing up in the coming weeks. We are keeping this page up-to-date with some of the larger known issues and what phones Fennec is currently known to run on, which will change over time. We currently only run on Android 2.0 and above, and some bugs could cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot. If you have installed our earlier build, you will need to uninstall it before this one will install due to a change in the way the builds are signed. These builds do not auto-update yet, so you’ll have to manually grab a new build when you want to see the newest changes.

Since the post Vlad made a few weeks ago about our first pre-alpha Android build, we have made lots of improvements based on the feedback we’ve received. We really value this feedback and look forward to more of it on these builds.

Fennec, meet Android

pavlov — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:02:02 +0000

Vlad just posted our first version of Fennec for Android. The work we’ve been doing on Android has only been going for several months, but Vlad, Michael, Brad and Alex have made really great progress! This is a very early build (pre-alpha), and there are plenty of bugs and things to improve, but we’re excited to start seeing what it will become. We’re hoping that people can provide us with feedback so we can continue improving the browser!

Stopping Development for Windows Mobile

pavlov — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:22:16 +0000

We have been building a version of Firefox for Windows Mobile for quite a while, with the expectation that Microsoft would be doubling down in the mobile market and hoping that they would put out a great new mobile operating system. We’ve been following the Windows Phone 7 announcements quite closely for the last few weeks, and had one of our developers in attendance at MIX last week. We know that the underlying platform for Windows Phone 7 is Windows CE 6, which is a big step up from the kernel used by Windows Mobile 6.5. Windows CE 6 is a platform that we have been developing towards, and already run well on, leaving us well positioned to have an awesome browser on Windows Phone 7.

While we think Windows Phone 7 looks interesting and has the potential to do well in the market, Microsoft has unfortunately decided to close off development to native applications. Because of this, we won’t be able to provide Firefox for Windows Phone 7 at this time. Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold.

The work on this project that the community and our engineering, QA, build, and automation teams has done has been great. I expect us to be able to use much of the knowledge and work for other platforms. We will be disabling the builds and test automation shortly, and developers shouldn’t worry if the tree breaks.

While I hope that we do see Microsoft provide us with a way to build Firefox for Windows Phone 7, we will continue to focus on the things that we can control: building a great consumer product on both Android and Maemo.

Firefox for Maemo RC3

pavlov — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:02:55 +0000

We’re excited to bring you the third release candidate of Firefox for Maemo. Since RC2, we fixed several usability bugs that were found, as well as addressed a number of performance issues. Based on feedback we’ve received so far, we were able to find and fix several crash bugs. To improve page load times and responsiveness, we tuned a number of preferences and improved several algorithms. We’ve sped up zooming and made our panning even better.

If you’ve already got RC2 installed on your N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly. Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can install it from here.

We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards. If you wish to enable our experimental plugin support, you will be able to manually via about:config, but do so at your own risk. We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plugins for, as some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well.

As always, we’re looking for feedback and suggestions.

Firefox for Maemo RC2

pavlov — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:48:58 +0000

The second release candidate of Firefox for Maemo is now available. Based on feedback we’ve received so far, we’ve been able to track down a major performance issue that was affecting the N900 and resolve the problem. We’ve also updated to the latest version of our layout engine, Gecko 1.9.2 RC1, which is the same version that the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.6 RC1 uses.

If you’ve already got RC1 installed on your N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly. Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can install it from here.

Your feedback really makes a difference, so please let us know what you think. Leave comments here or file bugs.

Firefox for Maemo RC1

pavlov — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:14:38 +0000

To help bring in the new year, Mozilla has released the first release candidate of Firefox for Maemo. If you’ve already got beta 5 installed on your N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly. Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can install it from here.

As always, we’ve provided unbranded Fennec desktop builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can use these if you don’t have a Maemo device or to aid in addon-on development.

We’ve improved text rendering, added new hooks for add-on developers, and continued to polish the application. We’ve addressed many N900 specific issues, including installing to /opt and the fixing the symbol picker.

We’re looking to get all the feedback we can as we move forward, so please leave comments or file bugs.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo

pavlov — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:44 +0000

Fresh from the factory, we’re happy to announce Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo to the world! This release features major improvements to performance and a fancy new theme. We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes. A lot of work has been done to make our theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release. Overall, this beta is a major improvement to previous Fennec betas.

In addition to Maemo build, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

We’ve changed quite a bit under the hood to make things faster including putting in place a tile-based rendering system to cache the areas of the page you’ve been to. Roy Frostig has a great blog post about this. The work that Robert O’Callahan has done on compositor phase 1 has been a big help and is allowing us to do things with scrolling that were previously rocket science.

Moving forward, we’re going to focus on fixing polish bugs, rough edges, and taking advantage of things like our new tile system to help avoid the user seeing a checkerboard while panning.

New Fennec Releases

pavlov — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:00:54 +0000

Welcome to the world both Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile.

In addition to Maemo and Windows Mobile builds, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

For these releases we have worked on improving the user experience, replacing our old theme with a much nicer looking one and fixing numerous usability issues. We’ve continued to increase performance and responsiveness. We’ve revamped how you install Add-ons, improved our download manager and the whole look of the application. We’ve started work on making forms on web pages easier to use, providing a nicer combo box UI than before.

Both of these builds are built on top of the same front end and back end codebases — their version differences are just to express their currently different usability levels.

We’re starting to see some very exciting Fennec Add-ons being built by the community, including things like GeoGuide which uses the new Location Aware APIs to show you things like maps and weather near where you currently are, and other things like GraffiTwit, a Twitter client that lets you not only write tweets but also post images you’ve drawn.

We’ll continue to polish the user experience and improve performance, and are already hard at work on some changes that will make big performance improvements.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1

pavlov — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:37:48 +0000

I’m super happy to announce the first beta release of Fennec for the Maemo platform.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta.

On the feature front, we’ve enabled plugins so you can now watch videos on your favorite sites, and we’ve got in our first pass at improved bookmark management and support for bookmark folders. A lot of time was spent on infrastructure that we could use to build the rest of our app with. You’re now able to scroll things like preferences and the new bookmarks list. One of our main focuses for the next milestone will be on polishing the user interface — areas like the extension manager will get a face lift and we’ll start working more on some of the usability issues people have reported.

Madhava Enros, our lead user interface designer for Fennec, has put together a great video of Beta 1 that not only shows off many of the things we’ve done but also does a great job of explaining many of the choices we’ve made.

Add-ons are starting to pop up and are already showing some of the great possibilities that Fennec provides.

The Weave guys have been working hard and have an extension for Fennec now that allows you to sync data from your desktop to Fennec. Having your desktop’s tabs, bookmarks, and awesome-bar contents on your mobile device really make a huge difference.

Felipe Gomes’ gesture addon is another great example of what we’re capable of. You can see a video of the awesome extension he’s done below: