Detecting slow add-ons

As we have been progressing towards a multi-process Firefox we have seen many bugs filed about slowness that after investigation turned out to be related to add-ons interacting poorly with the way multi-process Firefox now operates. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the add-on author has…

Brad Lassey

Jan 10, 2015

unsafe CPOW usage

Cross Process Object Wrappers (aka CPOWs) are at the same time amazing and terrible. They are amazing in that they make things Just Work™ in Electrolysis (e10s). One of the major issues with converting Firefox code to work under e10s is chrome code that runs in the chrome process and would…

Brad Lassey

Jun 19, 2014

New Android Widget Peer

I’m happy to announce that James Willcox, better known to many as snorp, is now an Android Widget peer. James has been doing reviews and acting as a de-facto peer for a while now so it is about time to make it official.

Brad Lassey

Dec 20, 2012

If your phone says “Intel Inside” you can now have “Firefox Inside”

Thanks to the great work of Kim Moir we now have nightly builds of Firefox for Android x86. If you have one of these devices, such as the Motorola Razr I, ZTE Grand X or Intel Black Ray you can download a nightly…

Brad Lassey

Oct 1, 2012

Five years at Mozilla

As I write this I’m sitting on a Virgin flight to SFO from Boston. Strangely enough, exactly 5 years and a day ago I was also on a Virgin flight to SFO from London. Back then I was flying out to start my new job at Mozilla. Earlier that year I had started to get antsy in my previous job…

Brad Lassey

Jul 30, 2012

Mobile Hack Day Boston

The mobile team is coming to Boston the 3rd week of August along with some of our friends from graphics, layout, sync, automation and QA for a work week. As part of the week we’re holding a hack day focusing on mobile games and mobile add-ons on Thursday August 16th on the 7th floor of…

Brad Lassey

Jul 25, 2012

ARMv6 Support on Aurora

We launched pretty cool product about a month ago. It got lots of really great coverage in the press. After spending 9 months rewriting Firefox for Android, we’re really happy with the results. But that mostly just establishes a baseline for us and onward we go. Firefox 15 has lots of…

Brad Lassey

Aug 4, 2011

NDKr5 in production

Firefox 8 for Android is now being built with NDKr5. Bug 657723 tracked deploying the updated NDK to our build slaves and updating the configuration to use it. After a couple of hiccups along the way we started producing on change builds with it on Wed July 27th and the first NDKr5 built…

Brad Lassey

Jul 22, 2011

Updated Android Development VM

About a year ago I posted a VMWare VM that had been set up to build Fennec for Android. That was still pretty early in the development of Fennec for Android and things have changed a lot since then. In particular, we now support developing with a stock NDKr5 (or NDKr6). So…

Brad Lassey

Jul 22, 2011

Slight change to mobile tracking flags

Since we switched to the rapid release process, the mobile team has been using tracking-fennec to track bugs we care about for a particular release (so that tracking-fennec=7+ means the patch or feature either landed in Firefox 7 or we expect it to). Yesterday…