Hi all, I am currently working on a FxOS app. At one point during the development, I came across a gotcha that doesn't seem to be discussed elsewhere. By posting here, I'm not sure whether I am looking for guidance or confirmation; just air your opinions and I'll be content :-)
(I'm not entirely confident that this is the correct forum for this. Please point me in the right direction if it is not). The question: for FxOS development, what would currently be a reasonably safe baseline target platform? I'll explain. MDN has a listing of the FxOS handsets available in the market[1]. At the time of writing, only one of these has FxOS 1.3 on it (1.3pre, to be precise; the Geeksphone Revolution). The rest run 1.0.1 or 1.1. Detection of JS capabilities has been discussed elsewhere before (eg: over at mozilla.dev.webapi[2]), but CSS capabilities are another kind of beast. For one flexboxes weren't supported until Firefox/Gecko 22, but FxOS 1.1 is based on v18[4], and therefore doesn't get those. The lack of flexbox support is disturbing enough. Mozilla encourages using them, by means of the Quickstart documentation[5], or using them for some Building Blocks[6]. Mozilla also encourages testing FxOS applications using the App Manager, but this gives you a minimum FxOS 1.2[6]. In order to test for 1.1 I have to use the old Simulator, which is discontinued and may stop working soon (the docs say I should be using Firefox 24 or 25[7], but I use it successfully on Aurora 30 on a Mac). If I went by this 1.2 baseline, I wouldn't be able to run my app on my own handset, a ZTE Open. Incidentally, the device was initially on 1.0.1 and I upgraded it to 1.1 myself. Now I'm wondering if it was a good idea to upgrade it at all, given that it may hide problems that my app may have running on 1.0.1. For the purposes of developing my application, I have installed Firefox 18, which I run using a profile separate from my normal browsing one. This seems to work well for spot checks, JS unit tests, and integration tests (for which I use Selenium). This gives me enough confidence that my app will work in other handsets. Despite my current solution, my questions persist. Mozilla seems to be encouraging developers to use 1.2 as baseline, but hardly any devices out there run it. This problem is not mentioned on the docs, or if it is it's not stressed at all. FxOS handsets are already being sold to the public, and there's a risk of disappointing users with apps that don't work for their devices, unbeknownst to the developers themselves. What do you people think? Thank you, [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_phone_guide/Phone_specs [2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.webapi/mQPZ-38wgy4/rYNnbZZaQsEJ(among other discussions) [3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/ [4] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_phone_guide/Phone_specs#Firefox+OS+by+version [5] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Design (in turn linked from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart) [6] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Using_the_App_Manager [7] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Firefox_OS_1.1_Simulator -- Pablo Brasero Moreno [email protected] _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps
