1044948 - [meta] View overlay frontend

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Overlays, defect)

Description

[Chris Kitching [:ckitching]]

Meta bug for construction of the overlay frontend responsible for handling VIEW intents.

UX have yet to come up with a design for this. Vague ideas include things vaguely resembling "Chat heads for tabs", but remain very up in the air.

On a technical front, this work will require Stages 1 and 2 of the backend work (See Bug 1044791), as well as, most probably heavy plagerism from the prototype I put together at:
https://bitbucket.org/ckitching/bubblez

Comment 1

[Chris Kitching [:ckitching]]

Some early work was done in this area which may prove useful to future adventurers:

Android provides the notion of a "window" which is conceptually similar to a window in a regular desktop window manager. Ordinarily, your application has a single window that fills the whole screen in which your activities and whatnot reside.
Windows may be transparent, but capture all touch events.

So, to make floating "bubbles" you get access to the window manager and create yourself a window for each little bubble. That way, touch events that miss the bubbles aren't consumed by a large, transparent window that fills the screen.
This rather hinders your ability to do animation (Android's animation libraries are not equipped to animate windows, they instead animate things inside windows).

So, perhaps the most useful thing from the code at https://bitbucket.org/ckitching/bubblez is the animation library, providing a nice API for translation, scaling, and fading of windows. Combined with the "floatyfox" objects (which are exemplar "bubbles") this should provide a great starting point for future work that is even remotely bubble-esque.

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.