The part of my job that is special — the part I wouldn’t get working away from Mozilla — is enabling community contributors to participate in and own the direction of Fennec (Firefox for Android). Recently I’ve had success attracting and retaining high-value contributors by offering medium-sized projects that let me and a contributor collaborate on an area of the code base over time. In part the first I talked about my motivation and discussed my approach. This post is a companion post: first a status update and then an offer of projects to the community.

The part of my job that is special — the part I wouldn’t get working away from Mozilla — is enabling community code contributors to participate in and own the direction of Fennec (Firefox for Android). Recently I’ve had success attracting and retaining high-value code contributors by offering medium-sized projects that let me and a contributor collaborate on an area of the code base over time. I want to write a few words about why I’m doing this and what I’m doing. In part the second, I give a status update and advertise a variety of new projects to the community. If you’re interested, contact me!

A Fennec (Firefox for Android) build can take about 20 minutes on modern hardware. By downloading pre-built C++ binaries and only building the Fennec frontend Java and JavaScript, we can build and deploy to device in about 5 minutes. The new mach artifact command landed in Bug 1162191 makes managing those pre-built binaries easy. Here’s how to get set up.

This post supercedes Build Fennec frontend fast!

A complete Fennec (Firefox for Android) build takes around 20 minutes on modern hardware. By downloading pre-built C++ binaries and only building the Fennec frontend Java and JavaScript, we can build and deploy to device in under 5 minutes. This is tracked in Bug 11621914.

This post has been superceded Build Fennec frontend fast with mach artifact!

Fennec (Firefox for Android) features are staged and ride the trains (Nightly, Aurora, and Beta) before reaching the Release audience. In an earlier blog post, I detailed how to land a feature behind a build flag. In this post, I’ll detail how to quickly update and test features behind such a build flag without clobber building.

I found writing my goals for the Firefox 36 cycle personally helpful, so I thought decided to repeat the exercise. Then I thought, "Why not share what I’m doing more widely?" In that spirit, here’s what I intend to work on during the Firefox 38 cycle.

I found writing my goals for the Firefox 36 cycle personally helpful, so I thought decided to repeat the exercise. Then I thought, "Why not share what I’m doing more widely?" In that spirit, here’s what I intend to work on during the Firefox 38 cycle.

Developing Fennec with Eclipse has been working well for quite some time now, but Eclipse is officially no longer supported by Google and the new standard is to build with Gradle and to edit in Android Studio or IntelliJ. I recently landed Bug 1041395 and friends, which makes it easy to build Fennec with Gradle. Here is a companion demonstration screencast.

GeckoView is a project that lets you embed the Gecko rendering engine into your Android App. Slowly but surely, we’ve making this process easier. It’s now really easy to include GeckoView in your Gradle-based application, thanks to a new Maven repository hosting Nightly GeckoView builds.

Fennec (Firefox for Android) features are staged and ride the trains (Nightly, Aurora, and Beta) before reaching the Release audience. Features that land on Nightly may — or may not — continue to Aurora. To support rapid Nightly development, while letting code mature before it reaches Aurora, you should land your new feature behind a runtime preference or a build flag. Here’s a guide to landing behind such a flag.