App Manager & Reflow Events

Summary

The App Manager is a new tool available in Firefox for Desktop, which provides a number of useful tools to help test, deploy and debug HTML5 web apps on Firefox OS phones and the Firefox OS Simulator, directly from browser.

Reflow events (logged from Firefox Desktop 27+ and Firefox OS 1.3+.): The Web Console also logs reflow events. A reflow is the name given to the operation in which the browser calculates the layout of all or part of the page. Reflows occur when a change has happened to a page that the browser thinks affects the layout. Reflow events are logged under the CSS category, as "Log" messages, as distinct from CSS errors or warnings. By default, they are disabled and can be enabled by clicking the "CSS" button in the toolbar and selecting "Log".

References

• MDN page
• Blog page
• Web Console

Use Cases

• Launch Simulator
• Close Simulator
• App Manager in Developer Tools
• Connect a device
• Add apps
• Open several instances of app manager
• Simulator tests: does the simulator work correctly? Can we run all the apps the same way we do with a device? Does the AppMgr connect all the time to the simulator?
• Update apps in simulator and device
• Debug apps

Test Cases

• The manual test cases for the App Manager feature can be found in this Moztrap testsuite
• Reflow Events: Verified that when debugging an app, on Console tab - CSS category with "Log" option checked - the reflow event with the time taken to execute it are displayed. The manual test cases for this feature can be viewed here

Important Bugs

• App Manager - P1 bugs

• Reflow events tracking bug - 926371

Sign off Criteria

• All the test cases were executed.

Sign-offs:

• App Manager: Monday 28th October 2013 - Signed-off on Firefox 26.0a2

• Reflow Events: Thursday 28th November - Signed-off on Firefox 27.0a2 (20131128004001), on the next OSs:
  • Windows 7 64bit
  • Windows 8 32bit
  • Ubuntu 13.04 32bit
  • Mac OSX 10.8.5
  • unagi device with Firefox OS 1.3.0.0-prerelease