Apps

Web App Developer Initiative

In 2015, Mozilla launched a new initiative to energize mobile web app development. This initiative is part of a broad trend that includes browser makers, web frameworks, cloud service providers, and content providers. We don't yet agree on what to call these new web apps, but we do agree on their potential. What unites all these disparate parties is a belief in the combined power of several new web standards. By making web apps that work offline and can reengage users, we believe developers will deliver experiences that will redefine the role of the web on mobile devices.

In the short term, we are focused on the combination of several API's -- service workers, web push, and the W3C app app manifest.

Communications

Team

• Thomas Elin, Program Manager
• Harald Kirschner, Engineering Manager
• Myk Melez, Software Architect
• Bill Walker, Senior Manager

Find us on IRC

• We use the #apps channel on Mozilla's IRC server

Mailing Lists

• apps@mozilla.com - Broader opt-in list for those interested in regular WADI updates.
• marketplace-content-ecosystem@mozilla.com - Internal WADI members. Used for brainstorming and general conversation.

Reading List

• Paul Kinlin, "Living with Web Apps"
  • In this post, Paul gives an hour-by-hour journal of a day using only web content on his smartphone. Along the way he offers a list of "ten deadly sins of a mobile web app" along with other reflections on his experience.

• Alex Russell, "Progressive Apps: Escaping Tabs without Losing our Soul"
  • Alex lays out his best practices for modern web development based around responsive design and single-page apps, and moves on to how the addition of offlining and "save to home screen" capabilities enrich the mobile web.

• Alex Komoroske and Elisabeth Morant, "The Next Generation Mobile Web"
  • In this 40 minute Google I/O talk, Alex and Elisabeth show examples using these new API's, especially concentrating on how web push creates exciting new opportunities for user reengagement.

2015 Q3 Deliverables

In Q3, our goals for WADI engineering were (1) to transition off our legacy projects, (2) to educate ourselves about serviceworkers and web push, and (3) to plan for Q4. We had roughly a month of Q3 to work with. We accomplished these goals by encouraging each engineer to build small prototypes and sharing what we learned in a daily standup. These prototypes led to our presentation in the Firefox OS all-hands, a Github Universe talk, as well as the filing of several important platform and product bugs (and fixing of one!).

• https://firekey.org/
• https://brendandahl.github.io/pdfcollection/
• https://marco-c.github.io/watchy/#/series
• https://mozilla.github.io/high-fidelity/#/podcasts

2015 Q4 Deliverables

In Q4, we will prepare for the launch of both Web Push and Service Workers in Firefox 44 by building one or two serious progressive apps and the infrastructure they require. We'll focus our engineers on one or two projects at a time, so we build team cohesion and benefit from collaboration. We'll carefully scope these projects so we can really hit them out of the park. Our tight focus, coupled with conference talks and blog posts, will make these apps useful references, helping build developer awareness for the launch of serviceworkers and push in Firefox 44. As we build real product code with automated tests, we explore the limits of our platform, find its bugs, and gather the knowledge we need to plan for the beginning of 2016.

Oghliner

Ship v1 of Oghliner, a library/tool to offline web apps using Service Workers and deploy them to GitHub Pages. We will base this on top of several existing open source projects, including sw-precache from the Chrome team (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/sw-precache).

• Oghliner v1 - https://github.com/mozilla/oghliner

Platatus

Ship MVP of at least one serious offline/progressive web app. We need to explore the space of possible use cases – to help developers, to find bugs in the implementation, to expand our own understanding. Much of the work of building even simple demo apps is app-related and not related to the underlying technologies. The leading candidate is Platatus, an app that offers a detailed, data-driven view of Mozilla's progress on delivering the technologies behind Progressive Web apps.

• Platatus MVP - https://github.com/mozilla/platatus - minimal viable prototype of reference app that describes standardization/implementation status of web platform features

Service Worker Cookbook

Create a cookbook of self-contained code snippets showing how to use Service Workers to achieve various kinds of cacheing and push notification use cases.

• https://serviceworker-cookbook.herokuapp.com/
• https://github.com/mozilla/serviceworker-cookbook

Bug tracking

These are bugs we've identified as critical to our ability to deploy these technologies to developers. We use bug 1201717 to track them.

Full Query

ID	Summary	Priority	Status
862395	Allow websites to control HTML5 Notification auto-closing (requireinteraction)	--	RESOLVED
997779	[Meta] Implement Web Manifest spec in Gecko	P3	NEW
1004055	Users don't know where the doorhanger went	P3	RESOLVED
1004061	Don't close some doorhangers when there is a click outside them	P1	VERIFIED
1056702	[meta] re-enable the serviceworker tests on b2g	--	RESOLVED
1059784	[meta] Ship Service Workers on desktop on the release channel	--	RESOLVED
1115820	Add telemetry to ServiceWorkers	--	RESOLVED
1120715	Implement Fetch RequestCache	--	RESOLVED
1130687	[Meta] Implement Service Worker Clients.openWindow()	--	RESOLVED
1167701	doorhanger should not collapse on unfocusing firefox	--	RESOLVED
1183625	support fetch window option	P5	NEW
1192458	Consolidate push and desktop notification permissions	--	RESOLVED
1197998	Add use counters for Push interfaces.	--	RESOLVED
1201953	console.log in a service worker doesn't log to the web console but logs to the browser console	--	RESOLVED
1202001	Syntax errors in service workers aren't logged to the web console	--	RESOLVED
1202052	Fennec reload button bypasses service workers by doing a "shift reload" unconditionally	--	RESOLVED
1203160	Turn service workers and fetch interception on in Fennec Nightly	--	RESOLVED
1203274	Service worker wakeup and lifetime telemetry	P3	NEW
1203359	Enable dom.serviceWorkers.interception.opaque.enabled by default once its safe to do so	--	RESOLVED
1203760	XHR hangs when attempting to cache in service worker	--	RESOLVED
1204115	"Work Offline" option should affect localhost as well	--	RESOLVED
1204397	NIGHTLY vs. !RELEASE mismatch enabling ServiceWorkers on Android	--	RESOLVED
1207262	[meta] Ship Service Workers on Android on the release channel	--	RESOLVED
1207714	Define and implement an API to expose GCM registration details to Fennec	--	RESOLVED
1207727	Rework updating service workers according to the latest spec	--	RESOLVED
1208195	Show sites opened from Android home screen bookmarks as separate entries in the Android recent apps list	--	RESOLVED
1208560	Unship service workers and push notifications in Firefox 42	--	VERIFIED
1209369	Better service worker discovery for developers	P2	RESOLVED
1212648	[Meta] Support of Progressive Apps in Fennec	--	RESOLVED
1212797	Show all registered service workers in about:debugging	P1	RESOLVED
1214248	[meta] Push DevTools for Dev. Edition 47	--	RESOLVED
1220417	Crash when using clients.openWindow	--	RESOLVED
1220747	[meta] Migrate about:serviceworkers to about:debugging.	P3	RESOLVED
1221965	Allow manually triggering a push subscription change	P2	NEW
1221992	clients.openWindow opens tabs in the private window	--	RESOLVED
1222097	openWindow: path resolution works differently in Firefox vs Chrome	--	RESOLVED
1222476	Notification with icon isn't shown	--	RESOLVED
1224283	Enable ServiceWorkers on non release builds for b2g	--	RESOLVED
1224711	Add custom domain DNS settings for platform-status.mozilla.org	--	RESOLVED
1225110	Support notification actions	--	RESOLVED
1226443	delay service worker updates triggered by events	--	RESOLVED
1228309	'online' event triggered when WiFi is turned on, before connecting to any network	P3	NEW
1228313	Information about offline/online events and property is confusing and sometimes conflicting between different MDN pages	--	RESOLVED
1232706	Promote "Add to home screen" if user visits website often	--	RESOLVED
1234054	Enable Push on Desktop release builds	--	RESOLVED
1237782	Remove support for appcache storage in Nightly and early beta	P3	RESOLVED
1238729	Add telemetry for 'add to homescreen'	--	RESOLVED
1241278	`Notification.requestPermission()` should return a promise	--	RESOLVED
1246276	Notification/Push Permission might be interpreted as a warning logo	--	VERIFIED
1246341	Add code/reason to notification ack/unregister	P1	RESOLVED
1247685	Implement `applicationServerKey` for subscription association and expose options	--	RESOLVED
1253377	[meta] Ember devtools support	P3	NEW
1257405	Increase auth secret length to 16 octets	--	RESOLVED
1257821	Content-Encoding should be 'aesgcm' for the new standard	--	RESOLVED
1584984	[meta] Remove support for appcache	P3	RESOLVED
1619673	Disable appcache in release	P3	RESOLVED

56 Total; 6 Open (10.71%); 47 Resolved (83.93%); 3 Verified (5.36%);

Other Resources

Program Plan tracking goal progression and key activities

(this page previously contained information about Firefox OS Apps)