992963 - Enable search activity in Nightly builds

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Search Activity, defect)

Comment 1

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

Attachment: android_search.patch

This gets us registered such that we can replace google now. We should probably have some new UX for this to take you to.

Comment 2

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Brad, can you provide a little more background here? What is this enhancement about?

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Ian - We were talking about how it is possible to be treated as a global search provider on Android. If you use the "swipe from bottom of screen upward" you activate the global search provider. Usually this just launches Google Now. If you also have Bing installed, you see the Intent Chooser appear and let you decide between Google and Bing.

Brad's patch adds Firefox to that list.

The question becomes: What activity would Firefox want to open in response? We could display the Awesomescreen, or we could create something new and very search oriented.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

If I guess at the activity in the AndroidManifest, this should open the regular Firefox application activity in response to the gesture.

Would we ever want to land that as is? I don't think we do. Let's get Josh to start an new activity, purely for Searching.

Comment 5

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Josh is working on this. He's starting with a basic new activity that just queries our history/search providers, but with an eye to building out from that. Hopefully we can talk next week when Mark's in town a bit too. I can schedule a meeting with UX if they want to come.

Comment 6

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: Early WIP - Add activity

Comment 7

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: Early WIP - Add search suggestions

These early WIPs add a new activity and *attempt* to reuse the ToolbarEditText view and the BrowserSearch fragment to provide search suggestions / history & bookmark search. 

As of now, this version requires you to launch Fennec first and then open the search utility (either via swipe up from home or the launcher). The parts that depend on Fennec are:

- Search engines - these are provided from Gecko, they have be stored in a file somewhere so we can eliminate this dep)
- Favicons - there is some initialization that I haven't been able to find/satisfy yet related to the LoadFaviconTask. The exception that is throwing is a ExceptionInInitializerError.

The other possibility is that we actually do some of fennec's initialization in the background (including starting Gecko?) when this activity is launched so that when a user clicks on a link the browser starts faster.

Comment 8

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Build for those who want to try it out. See note above about launching.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwqqgfwYmRg4cldJWWkyWDJPbzg/edit?usp=sharing

Comment 9

[Julien Sanchez]

The app is registered as search provider, and the "Firefox search screen" is display. But when I click on an service (like google, yahoo, twitter), nothing happens. Is it related to dev environnement ?

I'm on a Nexus 5.

Comment 10

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

(In reply to Jule Schz from comment #9)
> The app is registered as search provider, and the "Firefox search screen" is
> display. But when I click on an service (like google, yahoo, twitter),
> nothing happens. Is it related to dev environnement ?
> 
> I'm on a Nexus 5.

Yep I have the same problem, this is definitely no where near ready for usage
yet. I just whipped this up on Friday to give us an idea of what challenges
there would be in reusing these components from the main activity.

Comment 11

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: 01 - WIP - Add search activity with search bar

Comment 12

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: 02 - WIP - Add history and web search suggestions

Comment 13

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: 03 - WIP - Add null checks for selectedTab and layerView

Comment 14

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: 04 - WIP - Startup Gecko in background on activity launch

Comment 15

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: 05 - WIP - Add ACTION_SEARCH_WITH_ENGINE startup action

Comment 16

[Josh Dover [:jdover]]

Attachment: 06 - WIP - Open search engine suggestions in Fennec

Comment 17

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Josh - I don't know about your availability now that you're no longer an intern. Let us know what you can and can't take on.

I'll start looking for a few others to pitch in and learn the patches.

Comment 18

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Eric is working on this now!

Comment 19

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

I'm marking depends-on Bug 1017078, even though it's not a strict dependency, because See Also kinda sucks. We should specifically record searches performed.

Comment 20

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Oh, margaret beat me to it, and to the meta bug. Much better!

Comment 21

[:Margaret Leibovic]

This bug is essentially fixed, we just need to flip a build flag to turn this on in Fennec.

So, let's make this bug about flipping that flag when the time is right - hopefully pretty soon!

Comment 22

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Want to write a patch to flip the build flag?

We should make a try run just to make sure this doesn't screw up any automation.

Comment 23

[Eric Edens [:eedens]]

Attachment: bug-992963-fix.patch

This patch enables the search activity in nightly, as described in Nick's blog: http://www.ncalexander.net/blog/2014/07/09/how-to-land-a-fennec-feature-behind-a-build-flag/

There are two Try builds:
1. Conditional build flag (this patch): https://treeherder.mozilla.org/ui/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=18308b1b299f
2. Non-conditional build flag: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/ui/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=fb37b0faad78

Comment 24

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Comment on attachment 8465839 [details] [diff] [review]
bug-992963-fix.patch

Review of attachment 8465839 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Looks good! If the try runs go green all that we need is the icon patch, and then I'll land this.

Comment 25

[Eric Edens [:eedens]]

The Try builds look alright. There was an intermittent error on RC3 for [1], but it re-ran without problems three times. 

[1] https://treeherder.mozilla.org/ui/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=fb37b0faad78

Comment 26

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Hooray!

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/8593b668b998

Comment 27

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

\o/

Comment 28

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8593b668b998