Platform/Roadmap2012

	Firefox Platform 2012 Roadmap
	Owner: Chris Blizzard	Updated: 2014-12-9
	This roadmap outlines the current strategy and direction for Firefox Platform development through 2012. It mostly covers new developer-facing APIs. Work on performance and reliability is done elsewhere.

Vision

This roadmap covers the surface area that we will expose to web developers in order to let them build the next generation of web applications. Overall our vision for Firefox's role in the web ecosystem is:

We want the platform in Firefox to enable app-quality experiences and developer productivity that rivals native platforms.

This roadmap covers the high-priority items that we should accomplish during 2012 in order to achieve this goal. We've broken the list of items roughly down by domain area, with small amounts of context around each one.

Networking

Networking covers several areas that are important to improving experiences in web browsers. In particular, there's a decent amount of work that can be done to improve performance. During 2012, we would like to be able to deploy SPDY, which offers significant performance improvements to end users on sites with many resources, as well as better resource management for servers.

While SPDY's benefits are useful for sites that have SPDY-capable servers, most of the rest of the web still will run off HTTP for the foreseeable future. We've got some innovative ideas around how to deploy HTTP Pipelining, which would give many of the benefits that we can get with SPDY, but that will actually work with most of the web as its deployed today. Users will definitely be able to feel improvements from HTTP pipelining, especially for anyone using a high-latency mobile connection or over a trans-oceanic link.

In addition, in order to support a richer and more seamless media experience there's work that needs to be done to support the emerging DASH-for-WebM standard. This will let the browser and server adapt to changing network conditions, start a video faster and adapt quickly to changes in resolution. (Like, when you change from in-a-page to full screen.)

Apps

There are a lot of tasks around Apps that need doing. These fall into a few major categories:

1. Enabling a developer ecosystem. The first part of this is to allow users to take control of their identity in a way that fits with the decentralized model of the Internet. (This is useful to web sites as well, not just in the context of apps!) This identity can then be used to prove that they have paid for various items, software or services.

2. Enabling a great experience for users with applications. While apps will be based on an HTML5-based platform and should run in any browser, there are several items where the experience should be better with Firefox (or any other browser that implements the same functionality.)

3. Application communication and intergration. With Intents (and previously Mozilla Activities) it should be possible for the web to grow with each application that is added. That is, each application doesn't have to be something that stands alone, but instead can be used by other applications to enable new and interesting functionality.

4. New capabilities. Items like raw socket access, HTTP without cookies, background tasks and a notifications system are all things that are available to native applications. Installed applications (not necessarily web pages) should have these privileges as well.

Devices

While it's important to build a developer ecosystem to enable payments and a great install experience it's also important that we enable a set of web APIs for access to devices connected to a computer, tablet or phone. This includes everything from access to an NFC device, to offline storage to raw touch events from your tablet.

See also: the WebAPI page.

B2G APIs (Not managed here.)

 Dialer (B2G) - Underway
 Network Status (B2G) - Underway
 Vibration (B2G) - Underway
 Battery (B2G) - Underway
 Contacts (sicking & B2G) - Underway
 Ambient Light (B2G) - Q2
 Proximity to Your Face (B2G) - Q2

Layout

In the area of layout we need to enable a bunch of new ways to express layouts that designers have used through other tools for years. These include flexbox, which is very similar what what we've been using to layout the Firefox UI for years, Grid and Regions & Exclusions. All of these enable new kinds of experiences.

We also need to enable Gecko to run on Mobile devices. This means that we need to lay out pages with fonts in a sane way and enable spring scrolling for touch devices.

Please also see the Layout Feature Planning Page.

Media

Media presents one of the most interesting areas where there's opportunity to build something amazing. These fall into a few areas of note:

1. Enabling games. Mozilla's Full Screen API, which is also being implemented in other browsers, is useful for everything from watching videos to playing games. When you combine video, WebGL, fast JavaScript and the Mouse Lock API you end up with something that can create everything from small social games to first person shooters.

2. Combining media. The media stream APIs make it possible to combine HTML5 video, real time communications, audio generation, audio manipulation and all kinds of interesting media experiences. This is useful for games, but will also be useful for presentation software, video editing applications and new kinds of media experiences.

3. Real Time Communications. The emerging set of standards around WebRTC is the first time we'll see browsers being able to communicate with each other without all communication being routed through some kind of 3rd party server. While most of WebRTC will be audio & video, we're also building a data channel to go along with audio and video. This means that you will be able to build applications and games that save bandwidth and have low latency by avoiding the extra round trip required by a 3rd party server.

Tests

We started to ship parts of HTML5 in Firefox 3.5 The spec has moved since then, and there are still some small parts we need to finish. These are often tested on sites as a kind of proxy for standards support and we should invest in finishing where it's appropriate.