Mobile/Archive/WebApp Support

Summary

Provide means to manage web apps in Fennec, based on how Android and Maemo handle adding apps and shortcuts to the desktop.

Current Status

Madhava, Finkle and Fabrice have talked (together and separately) about a direction for webapps. We covered some of the basics, from a user standpoint, as well as some implementation details.

We have a basic idea for how webapps should be exposed.

Next Steps

• Implement some prototypes

Team

• Design: madhava
• Team Members: fabrice

Related Bugs

bug 583750 - [meta] Web apps support in Fennec

Designs

• Installing webapps will probably happening within Fennec
• Adding a shortcut to the device desktop should happen through the native device mechanism, not from Fennec
• Fennec may need to support a "Select a Webapp" UI for native OS shortcut mechanism to use (think "add bookmark to desktop" feature in Android)

Goals/Use Cases

• User should be able to install and uninstall webapps.
• User should be able to add a shortcut to a webapp on their device desktop
• User should be able to launch a webapp from the desktop shortcuts.
• Webapps use HTML features, and nothing more

Open Issues

• Should "uninstall" be a command _in_ the webapp or built into Fennec?
• What packaged webapp formats do we support? or none?
• Does this fit into the Mozilla webapp marketplace?

Non Goals

• Do not need to be able to launch webapps from inside Fennec
• Minimize the amount of webapp UI features exposed directly in Fennec
• Do not focus on widget support
• Do not add unfriendly APIs for webapps