Engagement/Developer Engagement/Surveys/Webapp-Frameworks-July2012

So what's all this then?

There is a belief going around that the mobile web is broken as a lot of development is only targeting iPhones without providing standard code that also works in Firefox Mobile or other browsers. We also made the assumption that a lot of this is based on tools and libraries that only produce iOS specific code and developers might be blocking out browsers without knowing that they do it.

In order to change this we want to talk to and help library developers to support more than iOS but we had no information as to which libraries are in use. That's why we quickly put together a survey on Google Docs and got 480 developers to fill it out in a day by means of the Twitters and the internets.

So here are the results of the survey. The numbers are interesting but for Mozilla the real treasure is in the answers to the questions in section eight. There is a lot there (a lot of repetition, too), but it is good to hear a few things we can change straight from the source.

Platforms

Not many surprises there, iOS and Android are in the lead, quite a lot of people see the web as a must-have (but this is a survey called out by Mozilla...) and Blackberry and Windows Mobile are not that hight on people's radar.

iOS

Android

Blackberry

Web

Windows phone

Libraries

jQuery rules supreme but Sencha touch and Zepto also have their place. Interestingly enough a lot of answers discarded libraries completely and considered them an overhead that will cause damage in the future.

Conversion frameworks

You do love your PhoneGap / Cordova, it seems. There is not too much competition in this market and a lot of feedback was questioning the sense of converting apps as "building them natively makes more sense".

Visual editors

The space of visual editors seems to be not to frequented with this audience - would be interesting to see if there is already a mass market for WYSIWYG-like tools in the web app space.

Webkit only?

71% of the audience saying they test on other browsers than webkit is making us happy of course, but seeing that a lot of the tools in use are webkit only makes that number questionable. Then again, we didn't qualify what testing entices in this case.

Reasons to test for webkit only

The main reason here is a lack of time to test on other platforms which is understandable - we can assume that a lot of projects from a planning perspective have 99% iOS/Android written all over them. The "lack of incentive" number is high, too, which is understandable - if you can't show the numbers, you don't get the time to support.

Open text questions

What can Firefox do better to make you support it

• Haven't used firefox mobile, as it's not really one of the major non-webkit platforms that our users use.
• Better dev tools.
• Remote debugging, profiling, ways to discover bottlenecks
• Official Nokia N9 port.
• Controllability from my laptop (which could be provided through Firefox on my laptop) with the two able to detect one another.
• Displaying logs and errors on my laptop.
• remote debugging, maybe with Adobe Shadow(?)
• Remote debugging and a frame inspector so that we can squeeze as many frames per second out of apps as possible
• Debug JS code from computer
• remote debug
• Remote DOM inspection and JS console
• Remote firebug would be awesome.
• Drop vendor prefixes and push Google and Apple to do the same.
• Remote Debugging
• Some kind of mobile firebug would be awesome! (check/uncheck styles and log elements)
• With smartphone testing, a way to see code output (the rendered DOM etc) on a companion desktop or tablet device. Basically Firebug for smartphone (this seems to be missing from most mobile SDKs).
• Run on older Android phones (ARM architecture).
• Have never tested in FF Mobile (sorry!).
• Full remote debugging of Firefox mobile on the desktop.
• Remote inspector & debugging
• Support prefixed features from other browsers. if there is -webkit-some-feature, convert that to -moz-some-feature
• A simulator for Mac if it doesn't exist yet.
• "Nightly tends to lag a bit loading JQuery Mobile webpages. Crashes very, very often. Perhaps some very basic dev tools like a console? Perhaps the search button could be overridden to pop out a basic console that shows errors, console.log, etc. I do most of my development with desktop Firefox, so the more closely desktop & mobile match the better.Also, more of the new HTML5 input types - number, date, phone, etc - would be nice if Gecko implemented."
• "- Better web-developer tools it's been a pain to debug mobile apps - Firebug / Inspector / Speed profiling, the works! - Being able to scale the desktop browser to various mobile devices screens would be good enough. For example, Firefox on the mac can't be resized to as low as 320px"
• "I'm trying to test as many browsers as I can, most of the time our apps are for the iOS primary. Mozilla can make good iPad browser, you're on the good way. And to add easy way to save the app on the home page and to use firefox for fullscreen mobile HTML5 apps. I guess it would be great to add media access to the mobile browser API (camera for example)."
• have feature parody with desktop Firefox. I mostly develop in desktop Firefox for access to firebug and other dev tools. Knowing that having things work in both FF environments would be fantastic.
• "Remote debugging tools In particular, AppCache is a nightmare to debug..."
• An integrated mobile debugging environment similar to the Opera Dragonfly toolset would be amazing.
• "- Remote debugging (though I believe that's in the works). - Auto refresh with desktop browser"
• Support for better remote debbuging
• Some sort of native developer tools easy to use on mobiles.
• Remote debugging
• debugging tools (like web developer)
• remote debugging
• "Remote debugging" similar to what you can do with Chrome for Android or Adobe Shadow. Being able to inspect and debug a page in a mobile browser using Firebug or the new built-in FF tools would be very powerful. Mobile developer tools. Remove the overscroll effect on Android (it makes swipe based nav surprising to users), as well as the haptic feedback whenever someone interacts with a button or a link within the web page.
• one-click cross-platform testing
• Debugging from desktop. Touch support (simulation) for deskto browser.
• "Common audio format (eg mp3 vs ogg). Anything to make cross browser issues easier"
• Remote debugging, if it's not there already, with live updates from the remote machine to the mobile device. Also a developer mode that tracks changes to the files and does a hard refresh every time.
• "Remote control like Chrome."
• "- Support MP3 - Improve mobile debugging (on the actual device)"
• Firebug mobile!
• Firebug/inspect like for debugging from dev computer (console, timeline, Dom explorer, ...)
• it's awesome already
• web-developer tools analyzing pages
• "a firefox mobile emulator like the ones you had with firefox for maemo or like opera. And don't tell me that firefox on desktop is the same! (position fixed, hover always the same color when you touch the screen, ..."
• Mobile Firebug...? :)
• Remote debug !
• Remote debugging, or at the very least some kind of debugging tools
• Options for a http proxy, especially for android where it is a pain to setup an http proxy for the os. Remote debugger
• Console, Inspector
• Remote debugging
• "Something like Adobe Shadow or Firebug. And easier to find documentation of the JS-Api since we don't do client side feature detection and it's a hassle to find out if it's window.innerHeight or display.height or whatever."
• Code inspector.
• A better controllable WebView (e.g. SSL Certificate management, URL filtering) remote debugging
• nothing really as not available for my phone (wp7)
• full access to phone's functionality A desktop mobile emulator, much like Opera's.
• Installed base.
• Remote debugging with full JavaScript step debugger is probably the most important thing.
• Actual remote debugging. Online screenshot service to test a URI. Give Chris Lord a pay rise so he does what I ask.
• debug tools, connect to pc and debug on pc with updates shown on mobile
• Integrate the web developer tool-bar in the mobile version is really important. That guys plugin rules.
• benchmark tool
• Better remote-debugging would be high class!
• "- Behave according to specifications / standards - Implement cutting-edge API's, lead the market - Proper web developer and debugging tools"
• A desktop version of the mobile browser, similar to what Apple does with the iOS simulator available in XCode.
• Firefox could be a little faster. It's so slow on my Galaxy S II.
• May already be possible, but really if i could use my developer tools on my desktop to talk to my mobile device. Like chrome does with chrome for mobile.
• Firebug mobile
• Remote Firebug
• Most of all standard compliance. It is also incredibly helpful if browsers don't lie (in terms of their capabilities or device properties). Remote debugging with Firebug (or Chrome dev tools) would also be nice.
• Remote debugger - something like jsconsole.com, but, like, "native".
• "instance of FFmobile to run on desktop, sending console output to firebug running on desktop or something alike"
• remote debugging
• Linux runner again, just like Fennec had
• "Sex, drugs and rock-n'-roll. How about a good code (email) editor? It'd be cross-platform from day one."
• "Remote browser debugging just like Chrome for Android would be nice. Bringing desktop Firefox's developer tools up to feature parity with Chrome would be nice too. As soon as I have problems with JavaScript in Firefox, I either need to install extensions or switch back to Chrome. Yuck."
• Developer tools! Developer tools! Omg. Remote debugging, dom inspectors
• Sort out Firefox desktop first, then worry about mobile.
• Text reflow on zoom! Remote debugging like with Chrome (or webkit inspector).
• Easy debugging/inspecting, a la Chrome on Android.
• Implement a comprehensive remote debugging API like Chrome.
• Hardware 2d/3d transform acceleration, dns prefetching, documented local storage/indexeddb limitations, remote debugging tutorial, css rules for controlling touch behavior, Android 4.1 support.
• Browserstack style testing API for real devices carrying Mobile Firefox
• remote debug...
• remote debugging, specially remote debugging for embedded spidermonkey!!!! please please please please!!!!!
• "Some kind of live view so I can see the site I have in my tab on my desktop on my phone in my hand without typing the address. Help work mobile dev into my workflow, instead of mobile dev being an attachment to my workflow."
• Better debugging tools
• virtual like envirenment in desktop
• "Debugging tools in a developer edition f the mobile web browser."
• Remote DOM inspection/Remote debugging.
• "good remote debugging tools device APIs ala Web API :)"
• Remote debugging, source maps
• Remote debugging (that is, remote dev tools) and an easy-to-install native client for desktop (Linux, Windows, Mac).
• Mobile debugger - mobile firebug
• Good Canvas support.
• More easily findable version of Mobile Firefox for desktop. It always takes me ages searching for the latest version, and then I find it's not that up-to-date anyway.
• provide developer options like turning off cross-domain checks, logs etc. much like the desktop version.
• "Two things: SPEED and STANDARDS. SPEED because even a new mobile device is effectively a 10-year old desktop: a Pentium 4 with a 1mbit cable modem. STANDARDS because I can't spend time hacking around vendor prefixes and their quirks. I want full W3C standard CSS3/HTML5 that will make my markup last for years. Mozilla was the clear leader in the 2000's but now is behind on both."
• Implement a remote debugging tool, speed up your js engine.
• The speed to compete with native apps. The biggest issue with HTML5 (one of the only ones) is performance. And making sure to keep up to date with the latest js/css/apis available to devs.
• Probably nothing, don't like firefox at all
• Remote Debugging (if it hasn't landed yet)
• Remote debugging.
• don't know, be awesome :)
• Firebug or equivalent in conjunction with a desktop simulator.
• if there are any differences to the Desktop Version, it would be nice to have an Emulator for running Firefox mobile on a Destkop-PC.
• "- Native simulators, similar to what Opera does with their Opera Mobile Emulator (with resolutions presets for the major handsets). - Remote debugging tools."
• Not testing ff though, just opera and ie mobile
• a dev mode in which i could quickly see screenshots from other browsers to easily check how my design looks in different browsers (something like xenocode site offers)
• Dev tools
• Remote debugging tool, possibly version of desktop Firefox with mobile version implemented.
• an iOS Version
• Desktop debugging
• "Better dev tools: * Override user agent * Screen metrics for responsive design (like latest chrome dev tools provide) * Touch events emulation"
• remote debugging made easy
• "Full featured remote debugging i.e. alllowing not only JS debugging (http://lucasr.org/2012/03/28/remote-debugging-in-firefox-mobile/) but also tweaking CSS, HTML, Net tab. It would also be great to be through wireless instead of USB only. Anyway, Firefox mobile is awesome with the latest release!"
• Remote debugging
• A page of emulators, with a catalogue of device listenings. It's never going to guaranteed accuracy, but it would be brilliant to be able to have side by side comparison in a window of firefox to speed up the development phase of a project.
• iOS version of Firefox would help a lot
• Hardware-accelerated CSS animations, decent WebGL support, better performance.
• "make firebug look and feel less clunky speed up startup time"
• "Debugging tools to be able to easily test and debug web apps on mobile, from desktop, like with Opera Dragonfly or weinre/adobe shadow. Being able to simulate touch events on desktop for mobile oriented web apps."
• "Something like Adobe Shadow or Chrome Remote Debugging. A plugin like YSlow/Pagespeed for Android."
• "Older Android support. A desktop simulator."
• Support Sencha touch ...
• Remote debugging, but firefox is now having it! So nothing (for now :p)
• "One thing that no mobile browser (IIRC) has is a toolset of development tools (console, JS debugger; think Firefox Developer Tools on mobile). Chrome's remote debugging capabilities (https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/debugging) lead in the right direction."
• easy to use debugging, like on its desktop counterpart (console, css/html/dom editing, js debugging, network tracing)
• Remote debugging (for JS off course, but also HTML and CSS)
• Modile Firebug-equivalent tool.
• "remote dev tools. make webgl work again."
• Equivalent of Chrome's web inspector and tools. Also, a JS API for logging memory consumption.
• keep the meego version updated and make it faster
• Same tools others mobile browsers have, plus many others.
• Devtools
• remote debugging
• Adobe Shadow
• We need a true web developer console like firebug !
• more usability and support the gecko engine on mobile phones.
• I want to sync my mobile with my desktop, so I can run the developer tools on my desktop while opening sites on my mobile.
• remote debugging, main phones resolutions viewports, bandwith throttling, retina emulation for retina sceens, perf monitor
• "It should raise notices whenever the displayed page is not strictly valid (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) or using unfinished features. This would lower the chance of a page breaking elsewhere. A debugger would be great."
• "firebug remote debugging"
• Maybe a kind of mobile version of developer tools / firebug.
• Remote interactive debugger!
• More integration between desktop and mobile dev tools
• "- As new versions become available, make it easy to run multiple versions concurrently on a single device. - Make it possible to identify device hardware from the UA string so that we can optimise our use of media queries and feature detection."
• debug console
• Support the viewport properties. http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/tableViewport.html
• Remote debugging tools, emulators.
• Mobile Debugging tool
• Maybe a desktop emulator would be great!
• "Good debugger Support of non-spec CSS proprieties (like webkit)"
• "Desktop emulator (the old Fennec emulator is on version 4 I believe) Provides a way to embed a Gecko/FF engine on a PhoneGap app on Android (a must... the Web View in Android 2.x is terrible)"
• "Decent support for WebGL canvas Fast as possible JS engine"
• Firefox mobile should be available on ARM6 mobile device.
• Remote inspector.
• Firebug mobile
• I tend to use tools like Browserstack, but as long as you have installers on major platforms, I'm ok.
• Yes, advanced users use firefox, or new users on an platform reconize firefox as 'safe'.
• An incredibly simple and fast OSX-based emulator.
• "good devloper tools. a good way to test on devloper machine. opera-dragonfly or chrome-usb like thingie to do timings on real devices. (only timing should differ with the emulator) the emulator should have good settings to emulate all kind off devices, not only screen size, but also touch/multitouch. (if it takes to connect an touchscreen to the devloper machine, so be it!) "
• A proper debug system.
• Hardware accelerated 2D canvas for HTML5 games and/or fast WebGL
• Always love remote debugging on the device a la WEINRE, but certainly, WEINRE is available to all devices.
• Remote debugging
• We test on Opera/Opera Mini, S40, Obigo, UC, etc. Sadly we don't test much on Firefox as it's not a terribly relevant mobile browser AND it has enough quirks where it's the *only* browser with major rendering errors (when the Nokia S40 browser gets it right and FF doesn't that kinda kills trust).
• remote debugger, accelerated canvas
• -webkit
• remote firebug
• More special CSS properties for increased customization.
• Access to NFC data (for phones with NFC support) and ability to tap to launch url when NFC tag is a url (much like QR codes work now). Access to Bluetooth and especiall Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE) on newer devices (iPad 3, iPhone 4s have BLE). Overally more device-level web apis (and I see you're working on them in the Boot to Gecko project).
• User Agent spoofing, sandboxed tabs (a la incognito windows, to allow multiple parallel sign-ins for testing), address bar hiding (stopped working in latest mobile release?), better sound support.
• Built in debugging (CSS inspection, Javascript console, etc) on tablets.
• Not sure. I'd like to see better support for SQLite databases though (only seems to work well in Safari).
• drop the -moz prefixes!
• A console, of course. ;)
• Orientation Change Event
• Clean & well structured docs for everything :)
• Integrated desktop to mobile testing and inspector.
• "The JavaScript Console Live HTTP Headers"
• A better (Fennec) emulator for OS X. More support for hardware APIs like getUserMedia etc.
• A desktop debuting for mobile phones so I can get all the nice tools when using the site on the mobile
• Good debugging tools, both for JS and HTML/CSS and network, including profiler. And support for the cool stuff like animations, 3d etc. And most importantly: performance and stability.
• well, too bad I only support WebView Apps, send me a BoottoGecko device so I can make for Firefox
• Haven't spent much time with it yet in framework testing.
• Better DOM/CSS inspector (not Firebug)
• "Have a ‘Mobile view’ window (possibly as an add-on) for desktop Firefox, which displays content as Firefox mobile would, in a window sized like a typical phone screen (or with options for switching between several typical sizes). Have an option for linking this to a regular Firefox window, so that following a link in one window automatically loads the same link in the other, meaning that developers can see how the page looks in both desktop and mobile Firefox at the same time."
• An emulator for Mac that allows Firebug-style inspection from the desktop. This is a real pain point when developing mobile websites for iOS, as a broken piece of JS or CSS can't be easily identified.
• Remote debugging
• Some type of developer tools
• Remote devtools.
• Updates Updates Updates ... more CSS3 etc.
• Remote debugging over network
• A feature rich remote debugger

What technologies/features do you use on Webkit browsers that are crucial for you and not available on others?

• HTML5 features.
• iWebInspector, remote debugging
• "Fast CSS 3d"
• "advance CSS animation function, better CSS transform, form element customization, file system, special pixel ratio media query, Plus web clip feature on iOS"
• Some of the more progressive CSS support.
• Webkit sucks, so that's not an issue.
• Most of the apple specific CSS3-wannabe additions
• "- Good CSS3 support (if possible, without pre-fixes for commonly used properties border-radius, box-shadow) - specific text fields (mobile, email, tel, etc)"
• "documentation, but even more user how-tos all around the web. easy or at least good explained how to add icon, show bookmark bubble, hide url bar and a lot of other small things."
• Nothing that is Webkit specific. We use CSS3 and HTML5 features, but they're also available in modern desktop browsers.
• HTML5 iframes with seamless and sandbox
• Users ! Remote debugging. Speed.
• WebGL (still spotty)
• Again, it's desktop debugging and inspection of a page that's running in a mobile browser. This is a *huge* time saver compared to trial-and-error CSS tweaks or alert-based JS debugging.
• I like the dev console
• Nothing really, setting up debugging is still to complicated on webkit
• Just keep up with chrome features and be at the edge of technologies
• Availability
• wkhtml2pdf
• The build in web dev tools
• The great Webkit inspector.
• "(1) Audio playback, specifically MP3. (2) Persistent playback, even when the user turns off the screen or opens another app. As on iOS, BlackBerry, Android browser, and Chrome iOS (but not Chrome Android). iOS does this really well, HTML5 audio can be controlled via remote headphones, lock-screen, etc."
• Not tech/features but sadly being driven by time demands and Apple not enabling default browser selection meaning visitor usage hugely webkit biased market share?
• Currently websql db, but we are fasing that out
• Speed, Edge features
• high performance css3 animations
• overflow touch which is a beast though :(
• javascript touch libraries.
• "Well, you guys do a great job with CSS- and HTML5-support at the moment. You're on the cutting I think. And Webkit is not that much better I think.
• I think the web-platform is a pretty great thing and with all the Device-APIs that are / are coming to Firefox you are doing a lot.
• This does not answer the question but especially you guys at Mozilla are doing a good job!"
• CSS animations, 3D Transforms
• I do my best to avoid things like that.
• Shared workers, overflow-scrolling, HTML5 input types (especially 'date'), 3d transforms
• Transitions, several HTML5 APIs. But, most important: Relatively consistent behavior between WebKit browsers compared to others.
• webSocket
• ripple and i never liked firebug
• "Persistent client-side storage with storage quotas that are able to be increased by asking the user for permission for more space. I already filed a ticket for this and was shot down. WebSQL will never come to Gecko, and HTML5 local/sessionStorage will never be enhanced with flexible storage quotas. Apparently IndexedDB is getting flexible storage quotas in Gecko. Hooray for me having to completely change my web app"
• Mp3 support
• The dev tools. Chrome/Safari have much better built-in debugging support (even though Firefox's support is quite good).
• "1 - OpenLayers multitouch support 2 - Android webkit only - direct access to camera via file input tag. ... this actually results in us encouraging clients interested in field data collection to use Android or ... 3 - Win7 tablets only - support for connecting survey grade gps to the browser (at which point we're using desktop browsers - chrome/ff)"
• They are preinstalled :(
• Remote inspecting (on Chrome specifically)
• Remote Debugging API and everything that springs forth (e.g. Chrome Developer Tools).
• requestAnimationFrame, websockets, flexbox
• The dev tools are still more advanced but Mozilla is progressing so I'm waiting ;-)
• The debugger and dev tools
• its snappy compared to FF
• "good html5 & css3 support remote debugging"
• Remote debugging
• Mainly because it is the default browser experience on iOS and Android.
• "I still use Firefox development add-ons. I test on Webkit. But I've considered reversing that for quite some time."
• The debugger tool is superior. I find transitions are faster, websql
• CSS3 and fast JS engine. Plus on iOS all browsers are webkit under the hood.
• Remote Web Inspector
• about:tracing and frames inspector
• CSS Masks (-webkit-mask-image), and -webkit-font-smoothing
• Touch events
• Faster JS engine, CSS3 layout modes, faster development cycle of WebKit engine.
• Remote debugging!
• none so far (yes I'm a newb)
• "Chrome Developer Tools zeptoJS is not available for IE"
• High and html5 capabilities are a must. Plus better webkit ports come with more capable hardware
• It's the only option with PhoneGap
• input type="range"
• Scrollbar modifications (or more generally shadow dom modifications)
• Speed of rendering and smoothness of DOM animations.
• better animation support
• Speed! ;-)
• Nothing. Firefox provide me everything I need and more.
• "None. Actually Firefox for Android is much more capable than all the other mobile browsers (despite the fact that it still feels beta-ish). The vast number of supported Web APIs on Firefox is great."
• touch events (especially touchmove)
• At the moment: experimental support for webRTC
• "dev tools. animation performance."
• Adobe Shadow
• Awesome Developer Tools
• not one, i tend avoid using enviroment specific feature for compatibiity
• None, except the stupid requirements by some clients that Sencha products need to be used.
• "Flexbox CSS Animations Local storage Offline/network detection API's"
• "Animations. Mobile compliant size of the components.
• Display Graphs. Page management (navigation management)."
• "There are differences, but main reason to use is: webkit seems to be default choice (i.e. shipped browsers are based on it). *Feature parity i.e. Firefox/Opera should support things Webkit does or whatever developer has been doing on it, instead of supporting -webkit prefix.
• "Hardware accelerated transitions CSS Masks and other webkit only proprieties "
• Webforms 2.0
• Remote debugging, home screen support and chromeless apps.
• Safari's hardware accelerated canvas is unmissable, really painful omission from Firefox Mobile, no browser implements it well for Android. Makes iOS way better for HTML5 games.
• We've got to support everything, so we don't really add stuff for webkit specifically. There are some transitions and animations that work best on webkit though.
• Adobe Shadow and WebKit Developer Tools.
• hardware accelerated css transition / animation.
• it's not about availability. It's about being able to work in a standardized environment.
• I guess I only code for webkit mobile, because I don't have access to non webkit mobile devices. I'm not sure about the best way to simulate it in the desktop.
• Websockets (best thing to happend to the web in years IMO). Device motion and orientation apis.
• Javascript & canvas performance (desktop).
• Probably not a great deal, but performance issues and slow moving development tools pushed me away to WebKit and now it is ubiquitous .... I need to compelling reason to code for Firefox
• Webkit Inspector
• web inspector
• -webkit-overflow-scrolling:touch
• HTML5
• Remote debugging
• "webkit - animations meta viewport supportcbackground-size with procents.."
• Incompatibility issues are the biggest
• JavaScript performance - put the JIT engine (Nitro) in the WebView apple please, Android, update the damn..browser to support more CSS3 styles and you know what just make Chrome the default webview browser on Android
• "Touch events 3D transforms"
• H.264 and MP3 support, as well as whatever codecs necessary for WebRTC interop (do open standards always have to be free as in beer?)
• mostly css3 properties
• Not really any, it's just the most popular browser allowing us to target a majority of the market.
• The chrome profiler gives me so much more information than Firebug's one
• Nothing special. It's just a little smoother.
• Remote debuggers. Web views inside native apps

Anything else you want to get heard?

• Good job with the Mobile WebGL. You really need to add WebAudio support and drop the Audio Data API, though.
• Sorry, I don't test on FiteFox mobile, only FiteFox desktop. I suppose that if it also works on WP-IE9, Android2-MobileWebKit & Opera desktop it should also work on Firefox Mobile. Hope you don't mind. Time is the issue here.
• Until this year, webkit was the only game in town. I am looking forward to working with more platforms. Any browser with a good remote debugger will win my vote.
• "Because we use Phonegap and primarily target iOS and Android, the packaged apps always use webkit. It's easiest for us to develop in webkit on desktop (usually Chrome) and then deal with the resulting quirks once the app is packaged. That said, I always try to not use webkit-specific features, and I occasionally load up the app in desktop Firefox or Opera just as a test. Usually everything is working fine."
• Firefox ROCKS!
• Firefox mobile on ios even without Gecko would be great.
• Firefox is the best.
• - Syncing between desktop & mobile (bookmarks/ history/ passwords etc)
• I don't like using webkit prefixes.
• The recent overhaul of FF for Android has made it a far better mobile browser than it was before. Keep up the good work. :)
• just make everything work on all browsers the same :)
• "Usually I just test it on my desktop, just to make sure the size is ok, the site is pretty simple, just basic html and css, using ajax to post. But have had trouble with javascript errors and it was hell to debug, so debugging is the biggest problem. The one that brings a good solution to that wins my mobile affection"
• "Nothing specific, just to ensure that you're always implementing everything in a standard and consistent way (consistent to other browsers) and be sure that everything in the spec is implemented before playing with new tech. It'd be great to see improvements in rendering and JS times as well as support for high pixel density displays (mobile devices and retina display apple devices)"
• As browser sniffing is a necessary evil to get apps working for the benefit of users, I'd suggest you work with uacss to get Firefox mobile support (http://cssuseragent.org/test/unit.html has Chrome iOS/Android, but not FF).
• General lack of debugging tools causing a lot of wasted development time on mobile
• rock on mozilla
• "Viewport orientation locking. Appears in html5 viewport specs but none of the mobile browser supports it (Already talked about i with Robert Nyman a few days ago)"
• nah, you're all good.
• That's what I said before ;)
• Please implement CSS grids. Flexbox is nice but not good enough for complex layouts.
• I really wanted to help GAIA project, but it's hard to start without an easy to install goot2gecko (firefoxOS) desktop emulator. Running it in just FF doesn't sound too good
• "Firefox is what I test mobile things on. Then Firefox Mobile and *then* the actual hardware stack.Unfortunately FFM (fennec) is unbearably slow on a SGS G1, improving the app speed (switching beetween tabs, 'clicking' a button and - perhaps - even offering kudos for bugs found / replicated / reported / discovered, etc."
• I'm so tired of Firefox's GUI being so obviously non-native on OS X. If Chrome can figure out good native GUI support while being cross platform, surely Firefox can too.
• Can't wait for the Firefox OS phones!
• Firefox doesn't run on motorola milestone despite it's running gingerbread. Really can't understand why.
• Firefox rocks!
• Just add remote debugging for embedded spidermonkey and you will make my year
• "Browsers should be defined by their User Experience, not their featureset. In this way Firefox won the battle for me long ago with their extensions and add ons. Out of the box Firefox was a fast, standards compliant browser, that I should shape my experience with via add ons. Recetly, Firefox feels like they're trying to play catch up to Google, and are copying stuff other browsers do. Additions like Sync, or the recent ""Inspect Element"" DOM inspector are still great first party features. But if I don't use them, or want to use an alternative add on, I can't turn off or disable the features. They're still sucking down my RAM, but if they were built like Add Ons, I could turn them on or off. I don't want Google's experience. If I wanted that I could use Chrome. I don't want Apple's experience. If I wanted that, the Mac shipped with Safari. I do want standards. And the Firefox experience. The one I can choose myself."
• "Remote debugging will, I think, become more important as we need to develop for more environments. With Windows 8 arriving soon, I'll want to be able to debug while in Metro mode as well as Desktop mode. On that note, I'm curious as to whether and how Firefox will behave differently in Metro mode in terms of rendering websites. Will it assume that Metro mode (when coupled with a touch-capable device) means that it's running as a ""tablet"", and that therefore ""tablet-optimised"" sites should be given preference? Will it change its UA string so that websites can do so? Win8+Metro is, in my view, the first mobile/desktop hybrid environment, and I'd love to see Mozilla take the lead in making this work for developers and users."
• 100% in support of this initiative. Such a shame we didn't learn from the desktop browser monoculture of not-so-long-ago.
• "I'm rather average -- I don't specifically do mobile apps. I just want my sites to work great and stay that way on mobiles via clever use of CSS3, rather than developing a separate mobile version. Thanks!"
• Chrome's incognito windows are the only thing that I really miss since switching to Firefox. The isolated cookie space lets me quickly check what a site looks like when I'm logged out, sign into a different account temporarily, or do online banking with all extensions disabled.
• "Our focus is enterprise mobile applications, leveraging HTML5 technologies and sometimes deployed within a PhoneGap wrapper. Our applications can run in connected or offline mode. However, while FireFox CSS3 support covers our needs, the continuing lack of websql support means our customers won't be using FireFox to run our applications in offline mode (which is how they use them 95% of the time). And no, IndexDB is NOT a viable alternative for our needs."
• Tablet support was taken away from Firefox Mobile (or so it seems) and that is a real disappointment to me since there is no way to test WebGL on my Nexus 7 now.
• For my personal usage I would like to see firefox running on webos devices.
• At the moment I don't see any advance having ff on mobile. I'd rather like to see a faster ff on desktop.
• I believe in you
• I work in online advertising, agencies just dont seem to care if it's not an iPhone
• Would be great, even if a dream, to be able to provide PhoneGap with Gecko embeded.
• Looking forward for a net panel for Firefox's own dev tools. Firebug slows down the browser pretty much and I only keep it for it's features.
• Move more functions of NET and DOM from firebug into the native developer tools, they overlap each other, and both have benefits over the other.
• The Firefox Mobile UI could still do with some polish, it doesn't compare well to Chrome's, for example.
• "the web inspector is faster, better looking, easier to use and feels a lot smoother than firebug. also, google provides a lot of videos, learning material and updates about new features of chrome's web development tools. haven't come across a centralized hub for that for firefox."
• "I'd like to be able to pop up the onscreen keyboard from javascript. Sometimes I want keyboard input to a custom widget, that is without using, for example, textarea. Drag and drop would be nice to have on touchdevices. I often want to use it, but it is quite hard on touch devices."
• "Providing a nice and fast firefox for Android the last time i tried it was disappointing. Additionally on android a webview with firefox in it would be so great"
• FF on Mobile is an exciting idea. Can't wait to see it get some traction
• Slow innovation, firefox can't keep up with the awesome stuff provided by webkit, making it less useful than webkit and not one of our primary platforms we deploy on.
• "i want B2G, fast :) and nice work on all your products, long live to mozilla"
• Firefox is supported as soon as a client permits using a technical base that allows cross Browser development.
• You're doing a great job on B2G. You're my heroes.
• "About ""conversion"" frameworks: Please don't ""convert"" web apps. I love PhoneGap, but simply packaging an existing web app leads to poor user experience (i.e. page loads, many requests, slow rendering...). In my mind, A PhoneGap app has to be designed differently. I like to think of PhoneGap as a js/native bridge that allows me to write an *app* in HTML/JS/CSS - and calling back to native code when I need to."
• Improve canvas support: speed and hard ware accelerated e.t.c
• "Web Audio API Web Audio API Web Audio API"
• Device API's support
• "Firefox/Opera, please don't make -webkit prefix a standard, that's short with long term negative consequences. Please get out, speak loud, let everyone know that your software is also available on devices, there are 1000s who use firefox/opera on devices. I am sure, developers would then start testing it on all browsers, hence would use standards in place. Most of developers think webkit is only option on devices. Firefox/Opera need to publish stats, showing how many people use their software on devices. Evanglists need to keep doing that for some time, and also send feedback to web-masters/companies whose content/site doesn't work properly on Firefox/Opera (devices). That's a way to send message in both directions (top to bottom; bottom to top). My 2 cents."
• Emulator for Firefox OS (just download and run)
• I haven't researched this, but it would be AWESOME if Firefox OS/OWD would auto-update or have an upgrade path that isn't hindered by device manufacturers. The slow death of Android 1.* and the continued use of Android 2.* due to the inability to upgrade holds mobile development back; it's the IE6 of mobile.
• "yeah, get te emulator right! DROP PREFIXES AS FAST AS POSSIBLE (your on the way here..)"
• "Any platform without hardware acceleration is *useless* for HTML5 games! See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=768959 We would use WebGL instead but it doesn't work for us on Firefox Mobile: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=768982"
• Have I mentioned bugs? Fonts (my current bug-bear with reserved unicode spaces), layout, etc. all render differently. Today Firefox give me more headaches then even IE7, S40 and UC. IE7 for fuxake?!
• focus on accelerated canvas ^^
• Rock the hell out of Firefox OS!
• "Just a thought... and this is more about Boot to Gecko / Firefox OS, please think beyond the app grid when designing a top level UI. Think instead in terms of layers of content and services. Apps should still be available of course, but they do not need to be front and center. With the web you can move across content and services as opposed to apps where you dive in and out of specific applications. For the mobile web to really work well we need to support user intent (which apps do really well... say 'I want to play a game', 'I want to check my calendar', 'I want to take a photo', etc so I launch an app), but we also need to better support asynchronous events. For example presenting information in context. When a user is in location A, services B, C, D, and F are all available. How does the user access this rich contextual information without having to open various apps for each type of info or service available in that location or situation. Some of this could be handled with notifications or another notification-like panel that can be exposed at the users discretion (but they may be alerted to) when contextually relevant content and services are available. We're also at a point where devices in the environment can offer useful information to mobile users (BLE for example, NFC, etc). Make this information available to web developers and new services will surly emerge. Of couse the challenge there is infrastructure... who will make the first move, will Mozilla or another company enable the technology to connect the web to the physical world, or will we first need the physical infrastructure in place (sensor nodes, NFC beacons, BTLE devices, etc) before anyone on the mobile device side commits to enabling connection to physical devices and services. Anyway that's the kind of stuff I find interesting in thinking of the future of the mobile web."
• Keep up the mobile performance tweaks--FF for Android vastly outperforms the stock browser for HTML5/JS games. Still not as fast as hardware-accelerated rendering like CocoonJS, though.
• Keep up the awesome work!
• Seems like Firefox Mobile is a great alternative for someone building a mobile phone platform, but from the perspective of most users, whatever browser is bundled is sufficient. Seems like a difficult market to compete in!
• More debugging tools may get me back to Firefox
• You are awesome
• A lot, let's talk about it over Twitter, email , in person etc. I run the HTML5 Meetup so let me know if you're interested in spreading the word about what you're doing with Mobile Web (hackathon on B2G would be nice :)
• "I don't use any library and i'm testing on my IPad and iPhone only. It just works, that's great. I use a custom made css compiler that I made for desktop and apply it to mobile. I tested a few times with Opera mobile simulator and it worked. So what I expect is that Firefox Mobile supports everything the desktop browser does and it should be fine by me. Just copy the behavior of webkit and everything will be fine (how hover are managed, for instance : one tap to activate if it triggers some element visibility then one click to follow the link, etc.)"
• Thanks for your work on IndexedDB and WebRTC!
• While I hope for more people to start developing without complicated frameworks and making use of more standards JS and CSS, mobile browser tend to miss very basic support based on the device, such as position: fixed, rescaling top/right/bottom/left based element when switching between landscape/portait or sometimes even when the onscreen keyboard appears/disappears.
• Good luck with levelling the playing field. Webkit heaven will soon become webkit hell without your efforts. I haven't forgotten IE in the early 2000s
• "I would really like uniform/universal HTML video extensions support. Universal animations rendering speed (and somewhat improved of what webkit offers now) JQuery mobile transition speed. World Peace...