On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 8:58 PM, Benjamin Francis <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Thanks for this Marcos, it makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the offer
> of help.
>
> On 11 February 2015 at 01:13, <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for putting these together. I would highly recommend that for any
>> feature people want to add to the Web, people follow the DOM team's
>> guidelines for adding new things to the Web Platform:
>>
>> https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/DesignGuidelines
>>
>> It's fine if we want to keep adding things to the FxOS Platform (as long
>> as we understand that *that is not the Web Platform*), but if we want to
>> add things to the Web Platform, then the above should help us get there.
>>
>
> In support of Paul's proposals around "granting permissions to the web" I
> would suggest we should consider re-visiting the "hosted", "privileged" and
> "certified" levels of "Open Web Apps" on Firefox OS.
>
> One possibility is that we split apps into simply "web apps" which follow
> web standards (and some proposed web standards) and "Firefox Apps" which
> use non-standard Firefox OS-specifc privileged features which aren't on any
> standards track. I think the name "Open Web Apps" may have made sense at
> the start of the B2G project but has now outlived its usefulness to the
> point that it could be considered misleading. No other vendor implements
> the mozApps API, some of the apps are not "web" apps, and there are now web
> standard alternatives to some of their features (which is a good thing).
>

When you say "(and some proposed web standards)" what are you referring to?
The subset of privileged/certified APIs that we manage to expose to the
web? Just making sure I follow you?


>
> I would suggest we should aim to migrate the vast majority of apps
> (including Gaia apps) to being web apps, but there are likely to be some
> Firefox Apps which are basically Firefox OS chrome (like the system app) or
> Firefox OS addons (like the dialer) and require chrome level type
> privileges.
>

I did some analysis of the permissions used in Gaia to see how feasible
this is. See[1] for data.

This confirms some of the high priority APIs that we might want to expose:
- deviceStorage:*
- contacts
- SystemXHR (hard to imagine this being exposed to the web)
- Camera: expose Camera API? Or add features to getUserMedia (latter seems
more likely, but are their hardware risks/limitations)
- Mobile Connection API is another popular one, but this is very dangerous.
Maybe we could look at exposing more of the read-only attributes through
the mobile-network permission but it has similar privacy implications to
geolocation, only more difficult to explain to the user.

Firefox Apps would still use HTML, CSS and JavaScript but would essentially
> be a new type of chrome level code for things which don't fit the security
> model of the web, would be packaged, and would have to be code reviewed and
> cryptographically signed by Mozilla like other Firefox addons. Web apps on
> the other hand must by definition always be hosted on the web and have a
> more decentralised system of trust.
>

Right - basically you are just talking about a name change here?

Certified --> Firefox App
Privileged apps --> Firefox App
Web app --> Web App



>
> We should aim to create new Web APIs to allow Firefox OS-specific Firefox
> App addons to be replaced by cross-browser web apps wherever possible.
>

I.e. make privileged apps into web apps (using your new terminology?)?


> This doesn't mean that we can't create voice calling and messaging web
> apps for Firefox OS for example, just that as Marcos says any pieces which
> directly call legacy telephony and SMS APIs are unlikely ever to be "the
> web".
>


 [1]
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mSJPO5tNG_xSybeLN8SBvVruCOHB1ZJkZ6unlfI23_Q/edit?usp=sharing
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