It certainly will be work to port to the native Firefox on Android. The good news is it's not too hard. The bad news is you have to port... again. Like you said, Firefox Mobile already caused an add-on shift when multi-process was created. Now, we have removed the multi-process, but also removed the XUL front-end. The end result will be a great Firefox Mobile, but once again, we are asking add-on developers to re-work their add-ons. I know it's no consolation, but I wasn't too happy that we threw away 2+ years of work either.
I am happy that the new, native approach will address many of the problems that caused users to avoid Firefox on Android. This means more people will install and use Firefox, making it a more compelling platform for add-on developers.
We plan on writing some tutorials and documentation on porting add-ons to native Firefox on Android, but the basic information is:
# Same add-on system. We didn't invent anything new here.
# No multi-process. You can use the classic ways of interacting with web content.
# No XUL UI. We can't overlay, or use DOM access for any UI. We have implemented several services using native UI and created a simple API for manipulating some native UI:
# nsIPromptService and nsIAlertsService are available and use native services
# NativeWindow is a new helper object that supports managing menu items, door hanger notifications and popup toast alerts (more coming too)
# JS XPCOM components can still be used to override and implement Gecko platform behavior
# Jetpack support is still in the works.
Comments
It certainly will be work to port to the native Firefox on Android. The good news is it's not too hard. The bad news is you have to port... again. Like you said, Firefox Mobile already caused an add-on shift when multi-process was created. Now, we have removed the multi-process, but also removed the XUL front-end. The end result will be a great Firefox Mobile, but once again, we are asking add-on developers to re-work their add-ons. I know it's no consolation, but I wasn't too happy that we threw away 2+ years of work either.
I am happy that the new, native approach will address many of the problems that caused users to avoid Firefox on Android. This means more people will install and use Firefox, making it a more compelling platform for add-on developers.
We plan on writing some tutorials and documentation on porting add-ons to native Firefox on Android, but the basic information is: # Same add-on system. We didn't invent anything new here. # No multi-process. You can use the classic ways of interacting with web content. # No XUL UI. We can't overlay, or use DOM access for any UI. We have implemented several services using native UI and created a simple API for manipulating some native UI: # nsIPromptService and nsIAlertsService are available and use native services # NativeWindow is a new helper object that supports managing menu items, door hanger notifications and popup toast alerts (more coming too) # JS XPCOM components can still be used to override and implement Gecko platform behavior # Jetpack support is still in the works.