Mobile/Roadmap

Introduction

Our roadmap for Mobile is a rough guess on what needs to get done at a high level, what order they will be done and how they depend on each other. This document is relatively fluid and is really here for the reference of people who are involved in the project on a day to day basis or those who are interested in learning about what we're going to be doing over the next six months.

Want to get involved? Have a specific area of interest? This is a good place to start since it should tell you what we're doing, where you can find more information and who is working on what.

Areas of Work

We're breaking this down into a few areas of work. These include Performance and Size, User Experience, Device Support (where it will run) and Product.

High Level Roadmap

Q1 2008
Performance and Size	Building a baseline of metrics so that we can measure progress for future mobile devices. Move work from the 1.8 branch to the trunk and measure the difference between the two to see how much we've improved or regressed.
User Experience	Start work to build an interface that we can use for testing purposes. Build an infrastructure to start testing XUL-built interfaces for various small devices. (N800 is 800×480 touch screen. HTC S730 is 320×240 non-touch screen.)
Device Support	Evaluate and merge the Linux/ARM support that Nokia did for the N800/N810. Identify work to target a Windows Mobile 6 device. (HTC S730 to start?)
Mozilla Platform	Track and attempt to measure late breaking changes already going in to help the Firefox 3 release, especially in the areas of performance and memory footprint. Begin to identify areas in the Mozilla Platform that might need changes to support Mobile User Experience or areas where Mobile differs deeply from Desktop systems. Build and test everything up to XULRunner on the 1.9 trunk. Document build targets and instructions for building the Mobile code on the N810 platform and Windows Mobile.
Product	Start automating the build process for ARM + Mobile as a first tier platform to create predictability in our support for Mobile platforms.

Q2 2008
Performance and Size	Have a full understanding of the baseline for performance metrics and have testing in place to make sure that we don't regress over time. Have several places identified where we are able to increase performance in the Mobile use case. Have several places identified where we are able to reduce memory usage in the Mobile use case.
User Experience	Start to explore navigation options e.g. spatial navigation, directional tabbing, panning, mini map, allow extensions to control navigation, software cursor. Evaluate in the context of displays that can rotate. Know what the options are for text input and explore how we can integrate that into the Mobile experience. Explore how we can enable device capabilities through the browser (GPS, Camera) and content loaded on the browser.
Device Support	Have N810 patches merged and be able to produce builds for that platform. Have Windows Mobile 6 builds up and testable. (?)
Mozilla Platform	Have areas identified and communicated with the platform team where they can help fix Mobile-specific problems with the platform. Understand risks and opportunities with the Mobile 2 platform work and how it will affect Mobile. Identify and scope graphics changes that might be required for mobile devices. (OpenGL ES, make-a-faster-pixman, etc) Identify possible optimizations we can make for large documents or large images in the platform. Understand how we might do offline applications for Mobile and if there's platform work that's needed to make that possible. (i.e. online/offline state related to GPRS or WiFi availability, low-bandwith json transfers, other bandwith-saving methods, etc.)
Product	Start on Product plan with identified partners. Have an understanding of what "Firefox on Mobile" means. Answer questions about how our values would be applied to Mobile and how they might manifest them in terms of experience and expectations.

Q3+ 2008 (Speculative and future work.)
Performance and Size	[ Open to discussion. ]
User Experience	[ Open to discussion. ]
Device Support	[ Open to discussion. ]
Mozilla Platform	[ Open to discussion. ]
Product	[ Open to discussion. ]