[Sugar-devel] Firefox and html activities

[Daniel Narvaez]

I'll start with a very general consideration. I'm more and more convinced
we should not just add support for html5 but build directly on the top of
web applications, as they are emerging both in the Mozilla and in Chrome
ecosystems. This means no native/html activities mashups and more
importantly the same kind of logic for installation, distribution etc. I've
not fully rationalised this assumption yet but, some advantages I see with
it

* Sugar activities will run wherever Firefox (or Chrome) runs. Firefox web
activities will run in Sugar.
* No adaptation necessary, no wrappers, nothing.
* It will be possible to submit Sugar activities to, say, the Firefox
store, giving them more visibility.
* We will not have to maintain browser embedding code, which can be really
painful
* We will be able to use new APIs which are being developed as part of
efforts like Firefox OS.
* Developers with experience with web apps will know what to expect.

Now the ironic part is that while it would be pretty straightforward to get
this going on desktops and on Android, it looks more tricky in Sugar. I
investigated using Firefox and these are the issue I run into.

* No support for offline, browser-less installation. It's actually mostly
there for b2g but it only applies to a set of zip files which are found on
the first startup.
* No support for webapps addons (needed to interact with the sugar
services, datastore for example). According to a developer comment on a bug
report it is planned for the future though.
* Necessity to replace Browse with a Firefox based webapp, to integrate
with the normal installation mechanisms.
* Very high per process memory usage. I think it's > 50 MB per activity. I
have not tested but I suspect b2g (and perhaps Android) gets around this
with electrolysis child processes, but Mozilla is not currently working on
electrolysis for the desktop browser.

Now the first two are probably solvable nicely by working a bit upstream
and has work arounds on the short time (not quite sure about addons, but I
have some good hopes).
The need to replace Browse is a bit scary. I hoped we could take an
incremental approach and would not need to rewrite any native activity. I
suppose we could have a webapp store activity instead.
Memory is a blocker I'd say, even if not an immediate one, we would want it
solved before we can start using webapps in the field. I've not looked into
it much but as far as I understood electrolysis is on hold mainly because
of compatibility with existing (non jetpack) plugins. So I wonder if you
could enable electrolysis at build time and have it working for webapp rt.
After all it works in b2g which is not hugely different.

I'll keep investigating this direction and update the list as I make
progress.



-- 
Daniel Narvaez
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