Hey Firefox Mobile for Android testers,
Welcome to those new that have joined the newsgroup. This is a biweekly newsletter to those that are testing Firefox Mobile in all channels. Our goal is to provide you with general mobile related news and guidance towards how and where you as a tester can help out! This newsletter will highlight general news and and provide status about the Nightly Channel.
What’s New
- Tablet UI Main browser layout
- Camera UI ( was introduced in Aurora )
- Experimental Flash support for Android – available for Android 2.3 and lower
- How to download the latest Nightly:
- Enable ‘Unknown sources’ in Settings | Application Settings
- Download and install the mobile Android version
Fennec is getting a facelift on Android
- We’re moving towards a native front-end using Android Java for Fennec 10+. That means that instead of using Mozilla’s XUL technology for the UI, it will be rewritten using a native approach to feel more like a traditional Android application. There is a discussion surrounding these efforts at http://bit.ly/pyTAqL
- Some initial performance numbers indicate that using these builds has yielded faster results than the current Nightly builds
- Performance numbers from test day : http://goo.gl/QFzik
- performed with : https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Responsiveness-Testday
- Performance numbers from mobile summit : http://goo.gl/Re1pR
- performed with : https://etherpad.mozilla.org/fennec-perf-ts
- Moving to the Birch Branch will cause most/all add-ons to break
- Most of the developer effort is already concentrated on the rewrite
- How to download the latest native UI builds:
- Enable ‘Unknown sources’ in Settings | Application Settings
- Download and install: fennec-10.0a1.en-US.android-arm.apk
- Be aware that these builds are very volatile, a lot of things aren’t working yet/properly
Testing Areas:
- Tablet UI on Aurora
- Virtual Keyboards (aka SKB, VKB, Soft Keyboards) : could always use some help in terms of testing. With your favorite keyboard type in web pages, please help with the testing.
- Website Compatibility : social sites like google plus, facebook; banking sites ; blogs, rss feeds, meme pages like reddit to give an example of some of the sites that we would love for you to use as an end user. Please use your favorite sites!
- Content copy/paste to clipboard could use more testing
- Please report any websites/STRs for checkerboarding issues
Reminder:
General News:
- Telemetry has landed. Please enable it!. You can find this in the Preference->Feedback-> Send performance data. Details on what Telemetry is does can be read on mfinkle’s blog ( http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2011/08/firefox-mobile-send-performance-data/ )
- Ted has landed an addon called Android Symbol Sender ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/addon/android-symbol-sender/ ). It provides us with symbols to look at a crash stack properly. Please install this if you are experiencing crashes in Firefox Mobile.
- If you are interested in the latest news regarding crashes on a weekly basis to see what is getting fixed and what remains, there is a weekly crash report available for viewing at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=QA/Fennec/crash_rep_17Oct2011
- If you do crash, please go to about:crashes and check to see if your crash was listed. If your crash was listed, please click on the link to verify that the crash was sent to Socorro.
- What’s new on various channels : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#What.27s_new.3F
Reporting/Feedback:
- If you run into a bug with the Nightly, Aurora, Beta or Release builds or even the new native UI builds, please file a bug in Bugzilla under the Fennec product ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fennec ) or (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fennec%20Native) respectively. If you aren’t sure how or don’t want to file bugs, then please send a message to the dev-platforms-mobile mailing list: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile
- If you have feedback on the newsletter itself, please send email to nhirata@mozilla.com
Thanks so much for reading and testing and helping us out!
Til next time,
The Mobile QA Team