895485 - [meta] Compatibility issues with Sencha Touch

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Anthony Ricaud (:rik)]

Sencha Touch doesn't support Gecko at the moment so we'll keep track of all websites relying on this library.

Comment 1

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

@Anthony,

do you know usually which type of "marker", library name, variable (in the JavaScript) etc, which is a hint that the Web site is using Sencha. I'm asking because that can help when doing quick survey across Web sites.

Comment 2

[Anthony Ricaud (:rik)]

I've never played with Sencha Touch so I don't know, sorry.

Comment 3

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

Un-meta-ifying this bug as there is concrete work that needs to be done to fix Sench Touch.

Christian - I seem to recall that you have contacts at Sencha. Have you already spoken with them about supporting Firefox mobile? If not, can you please put us in touch with them?

Comment 4

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

I've created a placeholder to document Sencha Touch issues/bugs at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/Mobile/Libraries#Sencha_Touch.

Comment 6

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Mike: it would be interesting to know if Sencha's so-called PaintMonitoring (see https://github.com/miketaylr/sencha-touch-2.3.0-gpl/blob/master/src/util/paintmonitor/CssAnimation.js#L8 ) works as expected in Fx, as this was one of the stumbling points over in bug 826542. I don't know much about our support for this stuff, but presumably one can write a very basic test and check if animationend events only fire when the animated element is inside the viewport..

Comment 7

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Good call, will add that to my things to test (still reading through the library).

Comment 8

[Christian Heilmann]

We are currently in negotiations with Sencha to support Gecko 100%. This is a financial decision, as their customers do not request Gecko support - most are enterprise companies that use HTML5 to support mobile and Desktop. Stormy is leading the negotiations.

Comment 9

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Thanks for the update, Christian.

I've more or less just finished testing Sencha Touch 2.3.0 in Firefox for Android and Desktop. The notes are here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/Mobile/Libraries#Sencha_Touch

The differences between older versions of Sencha and 2.3.X are pretty dramatic, see https://cloudup.com/cxnczfyICfx. I'm guessing that when they added support for Windows Phone we gained a lot of compatibility for free (e.g., the old dependency on window.orientation now has a fallback to measuring screen ratio).

With very few exceptions, basically everything just works.™ Some of the themes could use a little updating, but the default Sencha theme looks very nice. Even where they use WebKit only things like -webkit-mask, there's a good fallback story so it's really a non-issue. (I haven't done extension testing in the rest of the themes, though.) There were a few noticeable paint issues in stable that are not reproduceable for me in Aurora, so I'm assuming we've ironed out some bugs recently.

The only real compatibility issue I see is with the WebSQL adapters. If a site decides to go that route, there's not much we can do. As for existing sites out there, the best we can do is ask people to update to 2.3.X, which might not be non-trivial.

As far as I'm concerned, modern 2.3.X-based Sencha Touch apps are compatible with Firefox for Android (modulo WebSQL deps, which is up to the app maker).

Comment 10

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

can we detect Sencha Touch usage by looking for external JS files with "sencha" in the URL? Planning to add a plugin on https://github.com/seiflotfy/compatipede/tree/master/plugins to see if we can find Sencha-users among our tracked sites.

Comment 11

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

That's not a bad idea, Hallvord. Not bulletproof, but it will get us somewhere. Mind if I write the plugin? I'd like to try to figure out version detection as well (Adam and I had started on this during our workweek, but it fell through the cracks).

Comment 12

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Compatipede plugin here: https://github.com/seiflotfy/compatipede/pull/26/

Comment 13

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Thanks, I've just started a test run of 3700+ sites and it will be interesting to see the Sencha usage stats :)

Comment 14

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

There's still one open bug, but I'm going to close this meta. Sencha Touch isn't as relevant these days as it used to be. We can deal with one-off bugs as they come in.