Android Progress: More Pixels Edition at Vladimir Vukićević

Android Progress: More Pixels Edition

44 Comments Published by vladimir February 2nd, 2010 in Firefox, Mozilla

It's been a while since I posted a progress update (or really any blog post, ahem), but porting Firefox/Fennec to Android is progressing at a good clip. After working out a few kinks (and setting the all-important "you're allowed to touch the network" permission), I just got our first page load:

Mouse events sort of work, toplevel windows sort of work, keyboard doesn't work yet but shouldn't be hard to hook up. This is running in an emulator at the moment for ease of debugging, but it's working just fine on physical hardware as well.

You'll note that this is the full Firefox interface, and not the Fennec/Firefox Mobile UI; we're testing with the full interface because it's significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well. Given the interest in Android on netbook and tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these. Android has been pretty great to work with so far; it's a bit unusual platform for us due to its Java core, but with the NDK we're able to bridge things together without many problems.

We're still a ways to go before any kind of usable alpha release, but we're certainly one step closer. We'll also be able to accelerate our progress now that we have some of the basic scaffolding in place. I know I'm looking forward to running Fennec on my Droid, and there are tons of Android devices coming out that should be great platforms for Fennec.

44 Comments to “Android Progress: More Pixels Edition”

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1 Kurt (supernova_00) Feb 2nd, 2010 at 5:46 pm

Sweeeet! Keep up the great job Vlad!
2 Sungik Feb 2nd, 2010 at 6:53 pm

Impressive. Keep Going~~!
3 sethb Feb 2nd, 2010 at 7:40 pm

In a world that doesn’t, Vlad does. Congrats. This is really cool. Can’t wait to see it in person.
4 Jigar shah Feb 2nd, 2010 at 10:35 pm

Wooh….Superb…Blog man blog…Its really exciting to see its coming up on android…Once its alpha…i will get my first smart phone ;) Can’ mobile browser without firefox is really frustrating. I planned to buy one windows mobile once Fennec was released for WinMo…don’t see much progress there ? Wats up ? And status dashboard is cool …Keep updating.
5 tylerstyle Feb 3rd, 2010 at 12:45 am

Finally some progress. I can’t wait, to get my hands on Fennec. Nokia just isn’t an option for me.
6 Tase Feb 3rd, 2010 at 1:58 am

Wow, at first I thought the screenshot was a fake, because it was the full Firefox. Have you got GTK to work on Android or how did you do that?
7 gandalf Feb 3rd, 2010 at 2:59 am

This is great! Are there any instructions on how to build it? I’d love to give it a try :)
8 Adrian Kalla Feb 3rd, 2010 at 5:16 am

Nice :)
I cannot wait to test it on my G1.
9 Paul Feb 3rd, 2010 at 6:01 am

Awesome!
10 Geoff Norton Feb 3rd, 2010 at 10:23 am

Vlad,

Where are your patches for this in your tree? How are you rendering from the NDK?
11 Ivan Feb 3rd, 2010 at 10:47 am

Impressive.

I haven’t touched the NDK but I’m glad they released it so we can start seeing this kind of apps.

Way to go :)
12 RyanVM Feb 3rd, 2010 at 11:22 am

Sweet! Can’t wait until Fennec runs on my Droid Eris!
13 Harsh Feb 3rd, 2010 at 12:46 pm

This is awesome! This is great for the android platform too, as it proves that complex c/c based applications can be ported over.
14 Jaap Feb 3rd, 2010 at 12:48 pm

This is really cool. I’d like to sync my Firefox bookmarks with my Nexus One. If Fennec comes out on Android that should be trivial :-)
15 several Feb 3rd, 2010 at 2:00 pm

Huzzah!

I’m drooling. Really looking forward to Fennec on the N1.
16 drew Feb 3rd, 2010 at 2:54 pm

Awesome!

Android Progress: More Pixels Edition

44 Comments to “Android Progress: More Pixels Edition”

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