WebAPI/PlannedWork

NOTE

This is a backlog of ideas for potential future work. Nothing is committed until it lands in a release :) .

New Firefox OS APIs

• Inter App Communication

• Data Store

• Sync API (sicking), eg. keep GMail synchronized
  • mounir: do we really need that in the short term?

Fix/maintain current Firefox OS APIs

• Fix browser API (jlebar)
  • don't use iframe element
  • due to ^ can't load browser API when element is created
  • may want to rewrite in C++
  • Improve security checks
  • Support "nested child processes"
• Fix FM Radio API (jlebar)
  • doesn't behave sanely with multiple windows attempting to access it
  • will likely require major changes
• AudioManager (baku)
  • anything else to do?
• Bluetooth work may have fallout work (Team Ben)
• Contacts API in desktop, related permissions situation
  • We are planning to deprecate the current Contacts API so we should make sure that we keep that into consideration

Standardization

• Change <iframe mozbrowser> to <webview> (or whatever).
  • Right now the mozbrowser API doesn't get loaded until some time after the iframe is inserted into the DOM. This makes things difficult for clients who would like to be able to count on e.g. always being able to call setVisible().
  • When we make this change, we should look into converting mozbrowser into C++. Loading it currently has relatively high overhead, and we've put in a bunch of hacks to work around it.
  • If we do this, we should coordinate this HTML parser hack somehow and probably not expose it (and not reserve "webview" as a name for normal content).

• Add a way to make the manifest file discoverable (via a manifest attribute or something similar)

• Getting back notifications after the page has been killed. Some links: [1] [2] [3]

General DOM stuff

• DOM Futures
• storage.js
  • related to https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/Storage2013
• URL API (sicking)
• clean up rich text editing
• Speech API
  • isn't smaug working on that?
• Improve appcache
  • Mozilla's proposal: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013JanMar/0977.html
  • Google's NavigationController: https://github.com/slightlyoff/NavigationController/
• Storage
  • Sandboxed Filesystem
  • Quota API
  • Data-moving (temp -> perm)
  • move appcache, cookies and localStorage to centralized quota manager
  • speak with necko team about disk cache work
• support shared workers and background workers explicitly for things like social API (?) (dougt)
  • support web pages and apps doing something in the background

General Gecko stuff

• integrate better with profiling tools
  • work with SPS profiler people
  • IDB performance
  • for both B2G and Firefox
• Expose audio API to Firefox Desktop Internal code

Misc

• Build a Web API dashboard similar to chromestatus.com, see if we can integrate it with the devtools UI, and what other cool things we can do with it. (ehsan)
• tests
• resolving intermittent test failures
• worker-ification of existing APIs
  • make this easier

Untriaged / open questions

• do we still want to change the security model of workers as sicking at some point suggested?
  • loading has same-origin limitation