Javascript

Lucas blogged a while ago about some of the initial work on creating a remote debugging system for Firefox on Android. The desktop patches Lucas mentioned have landed, and remote debugging Firefox for Android is now possible.

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!

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:

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 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:

We just released Firefox 4 for Mobile (Beta 5) and it’s packed with some noticeable improvements. The primary objectives of Beta 5 were improvements in general performance, reducing memory usage and improving rendering while loading and panning the web content. Here are some results to show the progress that’s been made.

We recently landed some code in Firefox Mobile to better handle restartless (bootstrapped) add-ons. Turns out, Dietrich made a non-Jetpack add-on using the SDK and tried unsuccessfully to install it into Firefox Mobile. In the process of getting everything working, I decided to make a simple restartless add-on we could use as a testcase. It’s a copy of Dietrich’s original add-on, without any SDK usage. I’ve not taken the SDK plunge yet. The experience was interesting, educational and slightly enjoyable. The process of testing the install / uninstall and enable / disable mechanism without a restart left me as giddy as a schoolboy.