1818429 - (improved-tablet-support) [meta] Improved support for Android tablets

Status: NEW

(Fenix :: General, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Joe M [:jmahon]]

Improved tablet support

Rahul and Nicole provided a brief, need proposed plan of attack next.

Comment 1

[jacob]

Has there been any movement on this? Now that the Pixel Tablet is out, it seems there's a bit of a spotlight on Android tablets right now. I know I'd be appreciative of a better tablet UI

Comment 2

[Joe M [:jmahon]]

:jacob - unfortunately not much progress on this, yet. We've been revitalizing our app-wide design system, though, and are hoping to use that to make more concrete progress on more robust tablet behavior in H1 2024.

Comment 3

[Ian]

Can you please just make one convergent common UI, with an adaptive design that scales according to the screen-size, regardless of operating system? Gnome Web, Geary, & Fractal do this well.

Like Android Tablet users, GNU/Linux mobile users (e.g Steam Deck, Librem 5, Pinephone, various tablets, and other mobile devices you manually install Linux on) feel forgotten about.

There are even community repositorie that can be drawn upon to help make it a reality in an official release sooner.

Comment 4

[`{3rd: "Beedell", 1st: "Roke"}`{.JSON5}]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1818429#c3

[e-mail], I wholeheartedly agree. The current disparity between Fenix (which doesn't even have a desktop mode, unlike Chrome for AOSP) and Firefox for the desktop (which doesn't have a mobile GUI, meaning it loses an important lead it could have against Chrome for the desktop) is absurd. Having a common interface would obviously reduce the maintenance burden upon all the teams developing the desktop GUI for FF for desktop, the mobile GUI for FF for desktop, the desktop GUI for Fenix, and the mobile GUI for Fenix.

It's infeasible to maintain 4 GUIs, but we have to have at least 2 GUIs for each codebase. That means we need to use a common component soon, at the very least one for each codebase, so that we can bring that down to 2 over all codebases.

This comment isn't advocacy.

Comment 5

[soulfire]

(In reply to {third: "Beedell", first: "Roke"}{.JSON5} from comment #4)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1818429#c3

[e-mail], I wholeheartedly agree. The current disparity between Fenix (which doesn't even have a desktop mode, unlike Chrome for AOSP) and Firefox for the desktop (which doesn't have a mobile GUI, meaning it loses an important lead it could have against Chrome for the desktop) is absurd. Having a common interface would obviously reduce the maintenance burden upon all the teams developing the desktop GUI for FF for desktop, the mobile GUI for FF for desktop, the desktop GUI for Fenix, and the mobile GUI for Fenix.

It's infeasible to maintain 4 GUIs, but we have to have at least 2 GUIs for each codebase. That means we need to use a common component soon, at the very least one for each codebase, so that we can bring that down to 2 over all codebases.

This comment isn't advocacy.

I would definitely agree that there should be a unified UI being used everywhere, but the Firefox for Android team is mentioned that they are very insistent on using Kotlin for most of the app. So that may prove a problem to reuse a codebase