Mobile/firefoxhome

Firefox Home for the iPhone

One sentence summary: Bring your firefox experience to the iPhone.

The app will be a read-only viewer that integrates with the Firefox Sync service on the desktop.

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About Firefox Home

1. What is Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is a free application that lets you have access to your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and open tabs on your iPhone.

2. Does this mean Firefox will be available on the iPhone?

No. We do not have plans to ship the Firefox browser for the iPhone. Due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users Firefox for the iPhone.

3. What happened to Weave Sync?

The "Weave Sync" project from Mozilla Labs has been renamed to Firefox Sync and is now being incorporated into the Firefox roadmap. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/06/16/your-firefox-in-the-cloud-firefox-sync-and-firefox-home/ for more details.

4. What is the difference between Firefox Sync and Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is a native iPhone application that does a one-way data refresh of your Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone, whereas Firefox Sync is an add-on for Firefox that does a two-way sync of a user's Firefox history, bookmarks, open tabs and saved passwords between their desktop and Firefox mobile-enabled devices. Learn more about their functions, similarities and differences here.

5. How does the viewer in Firefox Home work?

The integrated Web viewer uses the native iPhone webview capability. Alternatively, you can also open any link in Safari.

6. Is all of my Firefox history synced to the iPhone? If not, how much of it?

We sync the 2000 most frequently or recently visited history items every 24 hours. In the interim, we tack on any history changes within that period.

7. How often is the data synced to my iPhone?

Data is synced to the phone every time you launch the app. We currently do not auto-sync as the most common use case is a launch-use-quit scenario, especially in the predominantly single-tasking world of apps on the iPhone. Users always have the option of forcing a refresh from the Settings tab.

8. Does it sync efficiently? I don't have an unlimited data plan for my iPhone. Should I be concerned?
We only sync changes since the last update for bookmarks and open tabs. And history is limited to about 2000 items. And there is no auto-sync. The median disk space used by Sync users is about 2-3 MB total for all of their Sync data and Home only has a subset of that.

9. How is Firefox Home licensed?

Firefox Home is licensed under the MPL.

10. I am having issues with Firefox Home. How do I troubleshoot?

Please visit the the Firefox Home Support page.

Security

1. How is my data protected?

Your information is encrypted and stored in the Mozilla servers. Only you can access data with your Secret Phrase. Firefox puts security as a top priority and syncing is no exception. Learn more about this and see a diagram here.

2. What is the secret phrase for?
The secret phrase is used to encrypt/decrypt all of your data on your clients. This ensures that your data is only ever accessible to you and all that the server stores is an encrypted block of data.

3. What encryption algorithm does Sync use? Is it proven to be secure?
Sync uses the AES encryption algorithm with a 256 bit key in a mode that requires an initialization vector for every decryption. Additionally, all client server communications are over SSL. The cryptography we use is in compliance with NIST requirements.

Downloading & Devices

1. How do I setup the Firefox Home app?

Follow these simple steps located on the Firefox Home Support page.

2. Why do I need a Firefox Sync account to install Firefox Home?

Firefox Home uses the sync capabilities from the Firefox Sync add-on to access your Firefox browser information and sends it to the cloud, where it is accessed from your iPhone.
3. What platforms and devices will it be available for?

Firefox Home has currently been developed for all generations of Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch. Although it works on older devices, the experience won't be as awesome as it is on 3G or 3GS.

4. What about an iPad version?

Firefox Home 1.0 for the iPhone will work on the iPad, but it is not optimized for the iPad.

5. How does it work with iPhone 4.0 / iOS 4.0? Does it take advantage of multi-taksing? Will it sync in the background?

Home works on both iPhone 4.0 and iOS 4.0. However, as with any new technology (in this case both h/w and s/w), we should expect to learn more about the platform quirks with more adoption. Home currently does not take advantage of multi-tasking. It currently does not sync in the background either.

Using Firefox Home

1. How do I know what data is available on my iPhone?

Go to your Settings tab to see your bookmarks, tabs and history entries that have been brought over to your iPhone. You can refresh your data by tapping the Refresh button.

Features

1. What are the main features of Firefox Home?

Get up and go and have exactly what you're looking for waiting on your iPhone: Your Firefox history, bookmarks, open tabs, Awesome Bar -- just the way you
left it on your desktop. With Firefox Home, you'll never have to retype long and painful URLs or spend time searching for your favorite websites. You can even send these links to friends via email. All of your data is encrypted. Your Secret Phrase ensures that only you have access to your data.

Developer Questions
1. What is the technology platform that powers Firefox Home?

Like Firefox Sync, Firefox Home is built on an open, simple and powerful set of REST APIs that you can use for your own applications. The User API enables account creation, authentication and other account-related actions. The Sync API handles data storage and retrieval. These APIs work hand-in-hand to provide a complete end-to-end synchronization service. All of our code is open source, including that for the server, which means you can even run your own servers if you want.

Project characteristics

We will be understanding the App Store review/release process's ability to deal with an open source project by bringing our "release early/release often" model.

We will *not* be writing a Safari plugin for Firefox Sync at the moment.

1.0 release requirements

• Data types supported
  • Bookmarks
  • History
  • Tabs

UI/UX

• Login using your Firefox Sync account.
• Allow the user to open URLs in the native web browser.
• Provide search interface for awesome bar data.
• Provide simple visual aids (for e.g. favicons, folder structure) to navigate through bookmarks. [P2]
• Automatically start syncing tabs without requiring any manual intervention. [P2]

Crypto/security

• Decryption of data must happen on the phone.
• Allow user to securely remember password and secret phrase on the phone.

Performance

• Do not render the phone unusable for long periods of time.
• Be intelligent about downloading just enough data at just the right time, i.e. it should not waste resources. [P2]
• Be intelligent about only caching relevant information. [P2]

Timeline

• RC: early June
• Submit to app store: mid June

Projects

Code repo: http://hg.mozilla.org/services/fx-home/

List of projects for 1.0

Note: This list starts as of April 6, 2010 and doesn't include all the work already done.

Engineering:

Description	Priority	Status	Details
Support Sync 1.3 API	P1	Done	Not needed, since we support 1.2 and there are no changes expected.
Switch search to use frecency	P2	Done (2010-04-26)
First run UI	P1	Mock-up done, we need a page to point to and backend support.	Limi to create mockups
Review crypto code	P1	}}	Dan W and Brian Warner (also dolske)
Review networking code	P1	Still looking	stuart to help find someone
Visual update	P1	Stuart is going to get Martell what he needs	Martell to help make new icons for tab, folder, bookmarks, back/forward etc.
Unit tests	P1	RUNWAY	bug 550600
Web backend to collect email address during signup	P1
Copy for web pages (email collection, done)	P1

Planning/coordination:

Description	Priority	Status	Details
Branding	P1	INFLIGHT	bug 550603 The right people are working on it
QA test plan	P1	RUNWAY	Talk to Matt about QA resources
Apply for Apple developer account	P1	??

Status Legend:

• RUNWAY - Waiting for design or initial planning
• TAKEOFF - Ready for work to begin
• INFLIGHT - Work is in progress. Patches should be in bugs.
• LANDED - Work has finished and is in the product.

QA

Ideas:

• Expand internal testing
  • How many keys do we have available left?