1288864 - [meta] Validating progressive web app version of Activity Stream in iOS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for iOS :: Home screen, defect)

Description

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

Activity Stream is a firefox addon written in javascript with react and other existing web technologies. I wanted to test if running the addon on iOS inside the current browser window is a viable options. I’ll outline what I’ve done so far and some of the issues I foresee with this approach. You can check out my branch here
https://github.com/farhanpatel/firefox-ios/tree/as-tests 

Data would still be stored in sqlite. And things like favicon urls, metadata, would be fetched on the iOS side and passed to AS.


I have verified that I can get data into ActivityStream from the iOS side. Using the js bridge I can create a shim that the iOS app can use to send bookmarks and history. 

Scrolling performance and initial load is good. I’ve only tried it on an iphone SE. Please check out my branch and try running it on your device. I am only aiming for ios9+ support. 

We will also get the ability to deploy AS separately over the air without having to go through the App Store. This will help us iterate quickly.

Some possible issues I think this approach will face.
No shared favicon cache. The webview keeps its own cache and any images loaded by it are cached separately than the images cached by the rest of the app. 

Things that still need to test
Updating AS remotely 
Infinite scrolling in AS (fetching more content)
Disabling hiding of url bars when scrolling AS

If anyone has thoughts on this approach please feel free to share!

Comment 1

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

Attachment: Topsites screenshot sample

A rough Idea of how this might look.

Comment 2

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

Attachment: Ipad topsites sample

Comment 3

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

Attachment: replacing only topsites panel

Instead of replacing all the home panels we could instead only replace the top sites panel.

Comment 4

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

I've made good progress on replacing only topsites. To test it out check out this branch.
https://github.com/farhanpatel/firefox-ios/tree/as-tests-alternate

The current implementation of the HomePanels does not cache the panels when switching in-between them. To improve performance of the topsites. I cache the topsites panel when switching between panels. 

I've modified the AS project by removing lots of unnecessary elements that were not used in the mobile version. The context menu which had things like (remove from AS, Open new tab, etc). This would work better built as native elements. We already have existing elements in iOS we can use for this. 

To get this to be a complete shippable replacement for the current topsites I would need to add
- Context menus to edit/open new tab/hide links
- Pipe real content from iOS
- CSS improvements 
- support for localization (AS is only in english. Maybe we launch this only in EN regions first?)
- A few tests :P

Comment 5

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

Another key component that would be required to ship this that I forgot to mention

The ability to remotely update the topSites panel.

Comment 6

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

After much discussion we decided not to go this route. Due partly to the iOS version of AS not having a similar UI to desktop.