Mobile Design Strategy

[Paul]

I would like to raise an issue that's concerning me. We're currently dragging our heels and prioritising the wrong things. The reality is that users that install alternative browsers, particularly for Android are niche users, generally tech-savvy that want the additional features and are at the forefront of platform changes. We want to target these users.

Google's design team launched Material Design a year ago, it was a huge thing and they gave everyone a huge heads up as to what was coming. A year on and we're still filing bugs to refine the visual design of Fennec that fits a now dated operating system visual design aesthetic. With people and thus people-power being limited, you have to wonder at what point we'll be able to update the visual design of Fennec to keep it modern. It's probably worth stating that the notoriously slow American OEMs are currently rolling out Lollipop to Samsung owners.

It goes without saying that there are concerns about how Fennec will depart from the overall mobile visual design strategy of Mozilla but the reality is that looking dated only serves to surrender users who really don't care about how similar it looks on another platform. If that is to hold back the ability of Fennec to look modern, then it goes without saying that we're doing it wrong. There have been proposals for the advancement of the mobile design language across the various different platforms, but it goes without saying that at least for now, Fennec is the front-runner due to having a larger install base than FirefoxOS or Firefox for iOS. With Fennec you get access to over one billion devices. On top of that, we're about to see cars shipping Android Auto and televisions being shipped with Android TV, that's two more sets of users to target and we don't have a product that looks like it belongs on those platforms.

Every app that has unveiled their material redesign has gotten a huge wave of free marketing within the Android developer and Android design communities. This is something that Fennec should be looking to ride on the wave of too. Even Evernote got a huge wave of free promotion. I fear that by the time Fennec gets around to actually moving towards a material design let alone unveiling it, we'll have missed the boat in that regards. Being at the forefront of Android developments is how you ensure relevance.

Just to be succinct here, we're designing for a year ago and Google are on the verge of unveiling the next big thing in regards to their platform. Which in fairness isn't likely to be huge visual design changes, but while we're playing catch up with visual design, how much are we going to be able to put the people hours required for utilising say the memory improvements techniques and battery consumption improvement techniques that may be unveiled?

[Paul]

Given that in twelve months, Firefox will be able to target Windows Phone, Tablet and Desktop users with a single build (Universal apps). Not to mention that Ubuntu Touch/Phone and Desktop users can be targeted with a single build (Convergence). And that yesterday Google announced that any Android app can be ported to ChromeOS, which obviously includes Fennec. A discussion about the fluidity and agility of our design impacts most Mozilla products.



On Tuesday, 31 March 2015, 23:41, Chenxia Liu <cl...@mozilla.com> wrote:


mobile-firefox-dev is a better mailing list for Fennec development and discussion.

> _______________________________________________
> dev-planning mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning

[Leman Bennett (Omega X)]

Is it confirmed that Windows Phone is a target? From what I understand,
Microsoft intentionally blocked 3rd party browser engines from being used.

--
==================================
~Omega X
MozillaZine Nightly Tester

[matthewca...@gmail.com]

# HG changeset patch
# User Victor Porof <vpo...@mozilla.com>
# Date 1338643994 -10800
# Node ID 0120b4b5d13e089bfe25f08b12e52878f72258ab
# Parent 5199196b65ec6bafc1fe877729f336c4db7d9abd
Bug 754806 - Intermittent browser_tilt_03_tab_switch.js | uncaught JS exception reported through window.onerror - NS_ERROR_FAILURE | uncaught JS exception reported through window.onerror - Script error at resource:///modules/devtools/TiltVisualizer.jsm:0

diff --git a/browser/devtools/tilt/TiltGL.jsm b/browser/devtools/tilt/TiltGL.jsm
--- a/browser/devtools/tilt/TiltGL.jsm
+++ b/browser/devtools/tilt/TiltGL.jsm
@@ -1554,7 +1554,10 @@
supported = gfxInfo.getFeatureStatus(angle) === gfxInfo.FEATURE_NO_INFO ||
gfxInfo.getFeatureStatus(opengl) === gfxInfo.FEATURE_NO_INFO;
} catch(e) {
- TiltUtils.Output.error(e.message);
+ if (e.message) {
+ TiltUtils.Output.error(e.message);
+ }
+ return false;
} finally {
return supported;
}
@@ -1580,7 +1583,10 @@
try {
context = aCanvas.getContext(WEBGL_CONTEXT_NAME, aFlags);
} catch(e) {
- TiltUtils.Output.error(e.message);
+ if (e.message) {
+ TiltUtils.Output.error(e.message);
+ }
+ return null;
} finally {
return context;
}