1579348 - [meta] Firefox for Librem 5, PinePhone & other Linux phones support tracker

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics, enhancement, P2)

Description

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Librem 5 is GNOME based phone, running on free-software stack.

As a goal of this tracker bug is Firefox fully support Librem 5 phone.

General things precedes this request marked as DONE is:

• Wayland support
• Ability to work comfortably with touchscreen interface with resolution 720x1440. Some ideas from upcoming Mozilla Fenix browser for Android could be taken.

Comment 1

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

A mobile Firefox for Linux would probably also work on the PinePhone [1] and other upcoming Linux smartphones. The Librem 5 and the PinePhone have a similar screen size of about 6 inch and also use the same resolution, both are ARM-based.

[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

Comment 2

[russianneuromancer]

Ability to work comfortably with touchscreen interface with resolution 720x1440.

Is there separate bugreport regarding this feature? There is many 7-10 inch tables capable of running Windows, Linux and desktop version of Firefox, which have similar screen resolution (like 800x1280, 1200x1920, etc.)

Comment 3

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

(In reply to russianneuromancer from comment #2)

Is there separate bugreport regarding this feature? There is many 7-10 inch tables capable of running Windows, Linux and desktop version of Firefox, which have similar screen resolution (like 800x1280, 1200x1920, etc.)

I looked for related bugs, but didn't found any, so I created meta #1579392 for start would be great to focus on linux systems with really small screen (6 inch like), because it's hardest to use Firefox on these, bigger screens may benefit from this work also.

Comment 4

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

Attachment: LIBREM5firefox-1.png

This screenshots has been taken on firefox-69 running in x86_64 qemu image. You can find it on https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Boards/qemu.html

Comment 5

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

Attachment: LIBREM5firefox-2-settings.png

Comment 6

[sagudev [:samson]]

Maybe it will be better to port fenix to PC for those cases and use Firefox desktop when Librem 5 is in desktop mode?

Comment 7

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

(In reply to sagudev from comment #6)

Maybe it will be better to port fenix to PC for those cases and use Firefox desktop when Librem 5 is in desktop mode?

I'm afraid that Fenix is Java code written for Android. Since Librem 5 running on full desktop codebase,
I think Firefox is better starting point, but maybe someone from experienced developers will prove me wrong ;-)

Comment 8

[vipin patel]

Padkhuri 486771 madhya pradesh India

Comment 9

[vipin patel]

Padkhuri 4867771 madhya pradesh India

Comment 10

[martijn]

This is also of interest for postmarketOS (we're supporting both the PinePhone and the Librem 5). Both are running 720x1440 displays with 2x scaling, making especially the new UI with the larger address bar not fit anymore (at 1.8x scaling it barely fits).

We do support a lot more phones though that can run Firefox with various resolutions, pixel densities and aspect ratios. It would be great to have a generic solution for this.

Comment 11

[brianaberts]

I would like to see a mobile UI for firefox as well. Would be great on the pinephone.

Comment 12

[compaq]

Firefox should probably just find a way to deal with those very narrow window sizes better in general, so it will benefit users on the desktop and make the usage on the phone properly working too.

Comment 13

[russianneuromancer]

Exactly, there is plenty transformers, 2-in-1 and tablets with low resolution screens or small high resolution screens. Several examples:

HP Stream 7 Tablet, 7 inch: 800x1280 but with x1.6 scaling it turns into 500x800 (Display0 from about:support)
Dell Venue 8 Pro 5855, 8 inch: 1080x1920 but with x2 scaling it turns into 540x960
HP Pro Tablet 608 G1, 8 inch: 2000x3000 but with x3 scaling it turns into 666x1000
Irbis TW36, 10 inch: 768x1024, no scaling
(Portrait mode is default for all devices, hence "backwards" screen resolution, i.e. 768x1024 instead of 1024x768.)
And so on. There was hundreds of models of such devices on the market in several past years, both of <10 inch tablets that needs scaling and 10 inch tablets with low resolution screens.

While 500x800 is lowest size in the list, to adjust interface to Librem 5 screen Firefox need to support 360x720 screen size (720x1440 with x2 scaling).

Comment 14

[sagudev [:samson]]

What about adding pref to Firefox that enable "mobile mode". Mobile mode would use different for small screen xhtml files (or same files with conditions #ifdef MB_MODE ...).

Comment 15

[Arend van Beelen jr.]

Can confirm the upcoming Android version is shaping up quite nicely. Would be good if other Linux-based phone OSes could have a similar experience.

Comment 16

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] (PTO)]

Jumping in because I hadn't noticed this bug before. Firefox' desktop UI is clearly unsuitable for usage on a phone but even before running into this bug I had been musing about how to make it work on postmarketOS. However rather than relying on desktop Firefox my approach would be based on the newly resurrected Boot2Gecko codebase. Right now we're still in the early stages of making it work well enough for modernizing KaiOS (whose base system is based on AOSP just like Firefox OS was), but my long-term plan is to make it work well on vanilla Linux (it already does run, but it's a bit rough around the edges). I'd just love to see it used on SBCs and Linux-based phones. The advantage of such approach would be that it's a lot simpler to make a reactive (and accessible!) UI with only HTML/CSS.

If you want to poke around you can have a look at this wiki page but be warned that the codebase is still very, very rough at this stage and suitable only for experimentation.

Comment 17

[Poopooracoocoo]

I opened https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1660674 in the hopes that this would make the experience better when the width is smaller but it was marked as WONTFIX: "We won't be fixing this outside a bigger redesign, if and when that happens.". So it looks like this isn't happening anytime soon, for anyone new here.

Comment 18

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

(In reply to Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] from comment #16)

... KaiOS ...

I believe this won't solve our needs. Firefox needs to have adaptive UI, since we're heading into age, where you connect your PinePhone or Librem 5 to the dock and use it on regular screen with keyboard and mouse. In this case, best effort would be making Firefox UI adaptive, which is Firefox perfectly of capable of. Also styling and doing minor modification in the Firefox for desktop codebase shouldn't be that hard.

(In reply to Poopooracoocoo from comment #17)

I opened https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1660674 ...

Thank you, I commented on it. We need to communicate with Mozilla management, since regular developers won't likely spend their time on it, when they are paid by Mozilla to work on different stuff.

Maybe would be interesting, to be able contribute to Mozilla for this particular "Adaptive UI design" project needed for our phones.

Is there anyone here, who can bring this idea to the Mozilla management?

Comment 19

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] (PTO)]

(In reply to David Heidelberg [:okias] from comment #18)

Also styling and doing minor modification in the Firefox for desktop codebase shouldn't be that hard.

Making Firefox UI completely adaptive would be a significant undertaking, and before any actual work it would require a very thorough UI design.

Comment 20

[David Heidelberg [:okias]]

(In reply to Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] from comment #19)

Making Firefox UI completely adaptive would be a significant undertaking, and before any actual work it would require a very thorough UI design.

Thank you for reply. Could you give me some information's how to processed? Should I create different bug for UI design team and what it should contain? Mockups of screens, conditions to adaptive UI?

Comment 21

[Poopooracoocoo]

As David said, amazing stuff is happening in the Linux world, especially on the GNOME side with Libhandy! It's a GNOME initiative: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Initiatives/-/issues/5

The settings and add-ons manager are web-based pages that could be modified to be responsive/adaptive. It'd be much easier than changing other parts of Firefox, like the library. One problem is the sidebar, which could be hidden behind a hamburger menu like Chrome, but that'd require some mock-ups. Something weird about those pages is that the calculated width of the content excludes the sidebar. Removing the sidebar results in a proper adaptive width.

I actually made that issue because I often have my windows tiled, usually side by side. It benefits all sorts of users.

Comment 22

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] (PTO)]

(In reply to David Heidelberg [:okias] from comment #20)

Thank you for reply. Could you give me some information's how to processed? Should I create different bug for UI design team and what it should contain? Mockups of screens, conditions to adaptive UI?

If you have a mockup in mind you can probably discuss it on the #firefox-ux channel on Matrix but keep in mind two things: Firefox UI has not been fully converted to HTML/CSS IIRC so even with a detailed design document achieving this goal would still take a very significant amount of work; aside from that we're really short-handed at the moment so it might not be easy to get help.