816974 - Make it possible to develop Firefox OS apps in Firefox (tracker bug)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Firefox has a great set of developer tools and would be the best environment for third party developers to develop web apps for Firefox OS.

Unfortunately B2G's flavour of Open Web Apps don't currently work well with Firefox. It's currently not possible to run any of Gaia's web apps in Firefox for example, and some Gaia developers would much prefer to develop inside Firefox than B2G Desktop or directly on a device.

It would be great if it was possible to develop web apps in Firefox which can access the same APIs available in Firefox OS. This bug is to track the work needed to make this possible.

Comment 1

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

I wonder if the FF OS simulator team Myk drives is working on tracks any of this stuff by any chance...Myk?

Comment 2

[Kevin Dangoor]

We (those of us involved in the Simulator) haven't been tracking the requirements to make it possible to use Firefox for developing B2G apps. The intention of the WebAPI project, I believe, is ultimately that any modern browser should support those APIs. It would still be desirable to have some sort of "simulator" because a developer running Firefox Desktop doesn't have a touch screen (and other bits of hardware) that a mobile phone user would, so you'd want to be able to pretend to have that hardware.

In the shorter term, and related to "Firefox has a great set of developer tools" from comment 0, in Firefox 20 you can create a developer tools connection to the Simulator which currently gets you the Web Console and Debugger. You can also use those same tools with Firefox on Android and a B2G device.

In summary: I agree that working on apps in Firefox would be an excellent goal, but we need not only the b2g/app APIs but also more mobile simulation features.

Comment 3

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

The Simulator is currently a great way to play with Firefox OS, and test out your already developed app in the context of Gaia. But the lack of development tools like Responsive Mode, Inspector and Style Editor can make it a painful environment in which to develop web apps.

This situation is improving, with a remote debugger which is just starting to be useable for B2G. Bug 816961 is tracking the rest of the work to turn B2G into a usable development environment for Gaia and third party apps. This includes making a remotable Inspector and Style Editor and is going to take a long time.

In the meantime Firefox already has these tools and it stands to reason that developers should be able to develop web apps in Firefox. The main thing preventing this at the moment is the permissions system. Myk, Francisco, Fabrice, Alex, myself and one other person whose name I didn't catch had a discussion yesterday about adding a feature to the Simulator to add permissions for an app to Firefox itself, so that apps can be developed as hosted apps inside Firefox.

Until B2G Desktop is a useable development environment or Firefox supports all the new Web APIs, this seems like a good solution to allow third party developers to start populating our ecosystem! They can develop their app in Firefox, then test in the Simulator. This is exactly what we hope to do at a hacking session with 60 developers in London on Friday.

Comment 4

[Kevin Dangoor]

OK, I'm fully in favor of the idea of expanding how much can be done in Firefox desktop bit-by-bit and if there are quick wins that expand the ability to build apps totally within Firefox, that sounds great!

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on