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Testing out Firefox OS 2.5

Mozilla's Firefox OS has been available on a range of devices for the past few years, but it can still be difficult to keep up to speed on the news about its development. A year ago, I took a look at the then-current Firefox OS 2.0 release on a Flame developer phone. Since the 2.5 release is coming soon, I decided to install it on the device for a quick test drive.

The update dance

The first thing to note when preparing to update a Firefox OS device is that updates can be delivered in a variety of ways depending on what "channel" your device is configured to use, how its on-board settings are configured, and on how well the device model itself is supported by the development community. That can result in a potentially confusing assortment of options. Clearly, the plan is for consumer devices to receive only over-the-air updates pushed out by Mozilla, with the additional hoops that developers need to jump through for pre-release and nightly builds serving as a de-facto filter.

Nevertheless, I was surprised to learn that there had evidently been a Firefox OS 2.2 release earlier in 2015—one which was never pushed over-the-air to my device, nor even announced in public. There is a "Flame owners" mailing list that is supposed to announce new releases. For some reason, the list archives are set to "private" so that only subscribers can access them; trust me when I say there have been no messages all year.

It is still possible to manually install updated Firefox OS images, though. The procedure uses the adb utility from Android's software development kit (SDK) to overwrite the contents of the boot partition. That part of the process is simple enough; there is even a handy Python script to back up user data (e.g., settings, saved WiFi networks, contacts, etc.) prior to the update.

I would say, however, that the "updating your device" page linked above makes it quite difficult to figure out exactly where to find the latest installation image. Partly this is because the wiki page changes its terminology frequently. For instance, is there a difference between a "nightly base image" and a "nightly build?" There seems to be, but I cannot tell you what it is. But partly the problem is that successive edits to the page tend to leave old information in place rather than remove it: there is a lot of dead wood that could be removed.

Ultimately, though, the update succeeded, although the 2.5-based image I installed introduced a new partition scheme for the Flame's internal storage; that made it impossible to restore the previously backed-up user data.

Circa 2.5

The 2.5 builds use Firefox 44 (which has not yet been released in desktop form) as the web-rendering engine. This provides access to a few new Web APIs for application developers, most notably the Data Store API, which lets apps access stored data such as browsing history and bookmarks. This is designed to let developers create replacement home-screen apps; Mozilla will presumably test such apps to ensure they respect user privacy before deploying them in the Firefox Marketplace, although the full plan has not yet been announced.

A number of other features have been teased for the upcoming release that, like custom home screens, will make Firefox OS more customizable. For instance, Mozilla has published a YouTube video showing the ability to edit the HTML and CSS used for individual app launchers.

That feature, though, does not yet seem to be activated in the pre-release builds, although there is a "View Source" option available already. View Source needs to be enabled first (in the "Developer" section of the Settings app), but it allows one to inspect the page source of pages in the browser and of Firefox OS's web apps themselves. There is a tracking bug for the feature in Mozilla's Bugzilla, where it indicates that a gesture (five taps) is used to activate View Source; on the Flame device, this no longer appears to be true—View Source is accessible as an option when holding down the power button.

Editing apps will be a nice addition to the platform, but for now there are a few other features already testable in Firefox OS 2.5. Individual web pages can now be "pinned" to the home screen, creating launchers. Other mobile OSes have supported this feature, too, but the Firefox OS implementation is a nice one: it (optionally) lets the user pin the base URL of the current page rather than the exact address; that can be helpful when pinning web applications that encode a lot of state into each URL.

There is also a new "verbose app permissions" feature that lets users approve or deny each permission setting that an app requests (e.g., geolocation information, the ability to access contacts, etc.). A similar feature was rather famously removed from Android in 2013, then became a fixture in CyanogenMod.

Speaking of user-protection features, the upcoming release also adds a private-browsing mode to the built-in browser, thus bringing it up to par with Firefox's desktop and Android offerings.

There are numerous improvements to the Firefox OS interface—perhaps too many to list in detail. A few of note, however, include a much smaller "progress meter" that takes up just two rows of pixels at the top of the screen, smoother animations that indicate when one has scrolled to the end of a list or page, and simplifications to the status bar at the top of the screen. For instance, in Firefox OS 2.0, the status bar constantly displayed an icon for my Flame's empty second SIM card slot, which needlessly took up real estate. It is gone in 2.5.

There is a lot to like in the current builds of Firefox OS 2.5; on the whole it exhibits more polish than previous versions, application launching is quicker, and quite a few bugs have been fixed. Those bugs, incidentally, included broken support for right-to-left writing systems, which were evidently far from pleasant to use in earlier releases.

Ironically, the most frustrating thing about Firefox OS is how difficult it is to find up-to-date information about it. I mentioned the missing 2.2 update and the silent mailing list earlier, but the problem is not limited to those issues. It takes quite a bit of searching to find the bug reports that describe the new features and, once found, the information in them is not reliable (as the View Source feature illustrates). I believe Firefox OS has the potential to grow into a mobile operating system that users will enjoy; it is a shame that Mozilla makes it so hard to stay on top of its progress.

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