Irina Sandu

Below are highlights of the work performed in the past 2 weeks on our way to releasing native-UI Firefox for mobile. Not all of the features below will make it into the first release, some are being prepared for the consequent updates.

• From the broader perspective, we are integrating Firefox for mobile into our Kilimanjaro project. The Kilimanjaro Event is an initiative to bring Mozilla projects (Firefox on desktop and mobile, Marketplace, Persona, and B2G) together in one integrated experience. It is an opportunity for our entire community to focus on products and features which are most important to Mozilla’s mission of an open internet and web platform.

• At the product level, we are currently at 20 beta blockers and 53 for the final release.
• One of the main points of focus for this release is make panning and zooming extremely smooth and minimize the amount of checker boarding a user experiences. We are tracking all of the remaining bugs to be fixed for this goal with bug 717774
• Users will be able to see at a glance which websites in the Awesome Bar are bookmarks. This will be indicated by a star mark next to the title of the website. – bug  701330

• We are thinking about how to give access in-product to file bugs directly into the Fennec component in Bugzilla. The mechanism would pre-populate as many sections as possible, such as device type and OS version, to save time. This is not a blocker for the release, but an enhancement for later iterations. – bug 747757
• We are working on an issue where entering accented characters in text fields in twitter.com causes the disappearance of the next letters typed. We saw this on phones with a hardware keyboard. If you have such a device and can test, please share what you see in bug 743468
• Providing a good user experience when browsing depends not only on the browser, but also on the communication between Firefox and the website it needs to display. A big part of that relationship is the User Agent. We are driving Evangelism efforts to make sure that websites will recognize the agent for Firefox for mobile in order to take advantage of our advanced HTML5 support. You can follow progress and also contribute in bug 747123.
• We are implementing a function to Undo the closing of a tab. This functionality is present in XUL-based Firefox and should be maintained in the revamped version. – bug 701725

• We have a bug open to build Firefox for the x86 architecture. This is not a priority for the release, but something that we are investigating. – bug 723713
• We are working on enabling Sync settings to be migrated from XUL-based Firefox to the native UI version, so existing Sync users don’t have to set it up again. This is a soft blocker for the release – bug 715550
• We have an open bug to add a button for the user to quickly go back to the top of the page after panning down for a longer while. This way it is easier to just go back to the Awesome Bar and change the page. If you have suggestions for how to do this, you can propose in bug 746381
• We are working on the list of add-ons that will be featured by default in Firefox. If you know some that would be very useful for mobile, add your recommendation to bug 744555
• We now have a favicon for about:firefox. – bug 739215

Extra: Aaron’s blog post on how to become a Firefox for mobile tester and where to talk to developers.