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.

FAQ

What is Firefox Home?

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

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 the Firefox browsing experience on the iPhone. For details, see Mobile/Platforms.

When will Firefox Home for the iPhone be available for download?

We plan to submit the Firefox Home application to the Apple App Store next month.

What platforms will it be available for?

Firefox Home has been developed for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

What happened to Weave Sync?

We are excited to announce that the "Weave Sync" project from Mozilla Labs has officially graduated and is now being incorporated into the Firefox roadmap. The service is now called Firefox Sync and will remain an add-on until it becomes a fully incorporated feature of Firefox in an upcoming major release.

What is the difference between Firefox Home and Firefox Sync?

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. 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. Both Firefox Home and Firefox Sync keep your data secure and encrypted.

What are the main features of Firefox Home?

Get up and go and have the comforts of your Web waiting for you 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. Have your Firefox history working for you the moment you fire up your iPhone. All of your data is encrypted. Your Secret Phrase ensures that only you have access to your data.

What about an iPad version?

This version will work on the iPad as is, but it is not optimized for the iPad.

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/labs/weaveclient-iphone/

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?