Connected Devices/Projects/Project Tablet

Project Tablet
Author(s)
Mozilla
Released
2016.05.11 (Initial Pitch)
Innovation Status
Stage 1 (Validation)

Project Tablet aims to a explore a simple, single-purpose tablet, completely dedicated to browsing the web.

If you would like to participate, you can get in touch with our connected devices participation team, or find us in the #tablet channel on irc.mozilla.org.

Project Overview

Hypothesis

Current tablet products are not meeting the needs of late majority adopters. There could be a demand for a simple, affordable browser-based tablet.

Problem

If all you want is a secondary device for casual web browsing and entertainment, existing tablets are over-complex:

• High friction app-centric experience more suited to productivity and communication
• Content buried inside separate apps
• Have to download an install an app just to try it, then clean up apps you don't use

Solution

A simpler tablet:

• Lightweight OS focused on web content
• Instant access to content, no app installations needed
• Automatically populated home screen

Project Status

Next step:

• User study to test a prototype and validate the hypothesis.

Success criteria:

• User study identifies a good problem/solution fit
• The concept resonates with users in the target segments
• Consumers would consider choosing the product over competitors

Design

• Features
  • Just the web, no app store
  • Dynamic home screen
  • Browse the WoT nearby
  • Automatic updates
  • Firefox Sync & Add-ons
• Early UI Mockups
• See video of early prototype in action

Development

• The source code for an early prototype of the tablet UI is on GitHub here.
• This is an experimental branch of Gecko which includes the prototype tablet chrome.

Building the Prototype

Building the prototype for a desktop PC is like building Firefox, so make sure you have all the Firefox build pre-requisites installed. The prototype uses B2G's Mulet development environment to run and debug the tablet chrome.

First clone the GitHub repository (this is a fork of mozilla-central on GitHub, it's best to create your own fork of this repository to checkout if you want to submit pull requests):

$ git clone https://github.com/benfrancis/gecko-dev.git

Checkout the tablet branch:

$ git checkout b2g-tablet

Create a file in the source code directory called "mozconfig" and add the following line to the file:

ac_add_options --enable-application=b2g/dev

Build:

$ ./mach build

Create a blank profile directory if you don't want to use your default Firefox profile:

$ mkdir profile

Run the chrome inside the development environment (hit F12 to show the developer tools on the right hand side) and scale it to size:

$ ./mach run -profile profile

You can also run the tablet chrome directly without the developer tools:

$ ./mach run -profile profile -chrome chrome://b2g/content/shell.html

Meetings

Meeting notes will be recorded on an Etherpad. Meeting times TBD.

Discussions

• IRC: #tablet on irc.mozilla.org
• Forum: Discourse topic

Contacts

• Ben Francis - Product Owner