Firefox Mobile to use native UI on Android
Native UI on Android
[Cross-posted to dev.planning, followups to dev.platforms.mobile please]

Hey folks,

After substantial discussion, we have decided to build future versions 
of Firefox on Android with a native UI instead of the current XUL 
implementation. The team is already working on this project on the birch 
branch [1], and we are tracking the early work on the wiki. [2] To be 
clear, we're still building on Gecko. This change is just about the way 
we build our UI.

There are several reasons for making this change, most notably:

* Startup - A native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL based 
UI, since it can happen in parallel with Gecko startup. This means 
startup times in fractions of a second, versus several seconds for a XUL 
UI on some phones.

* Memory use - We believe a native UI will use significantly less memory

* Responsiveness - A native UI has the potential for beautiful panning 
and zooming performance

Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open web, and 
this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible.

It's still early days, so we have a lot of questions to answer. We’re 
talking with the Add-on SDK team about the best way to support 
extensions. We’re talking with l10n about how to ensure we support 
Firefox users wherever they live around the world.

Next week, the team is meeting in Toronto to break down this work and 
prioritize it. We'll be on IRC in #mobile if you want to get involved, 
and pushing updates to the repo regularly. By the end of next week, we 
will have a clearer outline of the work ahead, and we'll update this 
list with those details.

It's too early for us to determine when this work will be ready for 
users, but we are certain that it will not impact the versions currently 
on the Beta and Aurora channels. Firefox 8 and 9 will ship with the XUL 
UI, including the new UI for tablets, while we build the native UI.

J

[1] http://hg.mozilla.org/projects/birch/
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI
--
Johnathan Nightingale
Director of Firefox Engineering
