Mozilla's Firefox Sync client submitted to Apple App Store | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's Firefox Sync client submitted to Apple App Store

blog.mozilla.com

33 pointsmbrubeck17 comments

It's Firefox Home, not Sync, that's been submitted to App Store. The release FAQ explains the difference:

"What is the difference between Firefox Sync and Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is a native iPhone application that does a one-way data refresh of your Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone, whereas Firefox Sync is an add-on for Firefox that does a two-way sync of a user’s Firefox history, bookmarks, open tabs and saved passwords between their desktop and Firefox mobile-enabled devices."

https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/1.0/releasenotes/

This looks promising. Firefox could win me back from Chrome with this addition.

Currently, syncing bookmarks with Mobile Safari if you use any other browser than IE or Safari (in Windows), is very unconfortable.

How do you do it at all? Some kind of web interface?

You know, I don't own a smartphone but I had never thought of this. I rely on my bookmarks quite a bit...

Looks like it might be a nice app. I wonder if Chrome will ever be released for iOS?

I've been using a 3rd-party web browser on iPad called "Atomic Web" and it is pretty nice. Of course it uses the WebKit engine to render, but it has ad-block, real tabs, privacy mode, and can do user-agent switching to make mobile websites render properly. For 99 cents it's a worthy purchase.

Neither Chrome nor Firefox can be released for iOS in anything like their current form (at least through the App Store). The current current SDK agreement forbids interpreters, which means Google can't ship V8, and Mozilla can't ship Tracemonkey.

All browsers in the App Store must use Apple's interpreters or none at all (like Opera Mini, which does its rendering on a server-side proxy and can't run JavaScript on the client).

Even if it allowed interpreters the iOS doesn't allow just in time compiling - you can't dynamically generate and execute code. This means V8 can't be used since it doesn't have an interpreter and Trace Monkey would do no tracing.

"with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code" - from the dev agreement. A few games have been approved to host an interpreter. So it's just a matter of Apple deciding if they want fully featured Firefox, Chrome, Opera or not.

You left out part of it:

"Notwithstanding the foregoing, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application."

You might argue that executing JavaScript is a "minor feature" of a web browser. Then maybe Chrome would be allowed. But almost of Firefox's frontend is also written in JavaScript and tied to Mozilla's JavaScript engine. So there's no way that we (mobile Firefox) fall within the "in a limited way..." allowance.

A 3rd-party rendering engine is a security liability that Apple cannot control, therefore they won't allow it.

They've approved interpreters for games for code that was written by the developers. I can't see them allowing an app that has a custom interpreter that users can use to run arbitrary code.

Apple would never allow it.

I first read this as, "Microsoft's Firefox Sync client submitted to the Apple App Store" and thought to myself, "wow, here in 2010, how things have changed..."

:) I look forward to seeing the day that this (hopefully) gets approved, even though I'm not an iOS user.

I'm such a pedant when it comes to commercials, but wifi on an iPod Touch in your Prius?

Did anyone else get a kick out of their sentence, "Firefox Home helps give you the information you need, when you need it!"?

If it's not an intentional reference to the world's biggest domain squatter, then it's a hilarious "incidentaloma." (The domain squatter's phrase is, "what you need, when you need it," e.g., http://www.bang.com )

Pretty clever way to make sure that the app actually gets approved by Apple.

Yeah, I can't believe another company that makes a competing product hasn't thought of publicly announcing when they submitted their mobile browser to the app store.

I want this on android pretty bad.

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