Blog posts tagged: windows8

We've made steady progress over the past 3 weeks on Firefox for Windows 8 Metro.

Platform Integration:

We have secondary tiles working, you can pin secondary tiles temporarily via a menu item. Like Internet Explorer 10, you can pin any number of sites to your start screen. When you click on the secondary tile, it will load the pinned site in Metro whether or not Firefox is already open.

We also hooked up the Windows 8 settings contract which means you can access Firefox preferences via the Windows 8 Settings charm.

Work is in progress for the Play To contract and the print contract.

Accessibility and Input:

We now support the soft keyboard which is especially important for when a keyboard is not attached and you are using a touch device.

We are also working on hooking up Windows 8 touch events, Windows 8 gestures, and W3C DOM touch events.

Core Changes:

We added support for XAML interop. This means that we can overlay XAML controls on top of our XUL / HTML rendered DirectX surface. We don't know all of the use cases for this yet but we'll probably use this for at least the app bar. The app bar is a bar of controls you can slide up from the bottom edge or your screen or popup via right click.

We also figured out PRI files in Windows 8. PRI files is an undocumented file type for storing resources.

We were using another program's PRI file until recently.

We fixed up some memory leaks on shutdown as well; these were not introduced but happened on Win32 Fennec which we are based on.

Approval for Current Plan:

We're hoping to get approval for the tentative plan which includes moving over the work to the main mozilla-central repository. The mozilla-central repository is where Nightly builds are made.

Up until now we've been developing and landing code on the elm repository.

Open Questions:

There are still several open questions, but the one we've been investigating during the period of this update most is how to handle compiling with the Visual Studio 2011 Beta tools and still have support for running those binaries on Windows XP.

To compile Firefox on Metro you have to use Visual Studio 11 Beta, but VS2011 cannot build binaries that are compatible for Windows XP. In bug 744942 we're discussing either patching the CRT, compiling a DLL with the WinRT code separately (2 compiler build process), or packaging a Windows 8 installer separate from the existing Windows installers and updates.

In any case, we will be supporting Windows XP in the same way we always have. I'm personally disappointed that VS 2011 drops XP support given that Windows XP has extended support up until April 8th, 2014.

Firefox Work Week:

Perhaps some of the most exciting work so far will happen this week coming up.

On Monday I'm heading to Toronto for the Firefox work week. One of the hacking goals during this week is to get some significant initial work done on the UI for Firefox on Metro. This work will be based on the UX work from Stephen Horlander and Yuan Wang. In the initial work we'll have the tab bar and address bar on the top and site specific options such as pin site on an app bar accessible from the bottom edge.

This post is a continuation of the Windows 8 status update first started on this blog post.

We're now past the hardly documented parts of development we were fighting with last week, and things are really starting to heat up. From here, most WinRT development topics should be nicely documented because they are now similar to any work done in a C++ Metro application.

We're keeping organized via an etherpad similar to how the snappy project stays connected. Please ping someone on #windev on IRC if you'd like the URL.

Languages we'll be programming in

We're moving ahead with C++/CX and dropping down into WRL when needed. It is still possible that we will one day port the C++/CX parts to only WRL.

In the end though, with C++/CX you get native code, code that is 10x less the size, and code that is less prone to leaks. Less code means less to maintain and faster innovation. C++/CX is also documented and supported a lot better than WRL.

We have a XAML window and we use DirectX to paint to it taking up the entire area of the screen.

Development milestones

This week Jim Mathies was a rock star and made significant progress in many areas:

• He added in the build config needed to build Fennec or Firefox as a Metro application.
• He started work on a new widget layer.
• He also got events working. Getting events working was hard because the UI thread is not the main thread.

This week I spent some of my time finishing an old project and the rest on Windows 8 work:

• I hooked up the WinRT window to our graphics code (WinRT to Thebes). Metro does not give us easy and reliable access to an HWND and instead has a CoreWindow, so extra new code was needed inside the graphics module. In particular I added most of this new code in gfx/thebes and in gfx/cairo. We don't have support for the Azure back end yet. The new code added in the graphics modules does not use C++/CX.
• I also implemented support for Metro snap in regards to our rendering code. This means you can have a metro application beside our browser when in Metro mode.

Firefox on Metro will not simply be Firefox desktop copied into the Metro environment, we are embracing the framework instead of fighting it.

How to get the development environment setup yourself

The code for this project is happening in the elm branch, you can see the changelog and checkout the project using hg here. The metro subfolder contains our research but most of the new code is going in widget/windows/winrt.

We're currently compiling and working with a fennec mozconfig setup with the following options added:

ac_add_options --enable-win8metro
ac_add_options --with-windows-version=602

The option --enable-win8metro adds in the -ZW flag in the widget/windows/winrt module only, which makes it so C++/CX code is allowed. This LIBPATH environment variable must also exist.

UX milestones

Stephen Horlander started work on the Metro splashscreen and tile. You can see some experimentation on the tile and splashscreen here.

I added these resources into the elm repository, it's definitely more exciting to develop when you click on a meaningful tile and see a cool splashscreen.

New contributors

Several developers have expressed interest in helping the project including Tim Abraldes, Wes Johnston, David Woolbright, Burak Yigit Kaya, and Berker Peksag. I'm excited to have more hands on the project in the coming weeks.

Next development steps

Now that we have event handling and thebes hooked up, we should be pretty close to getting something resembling a browser. We're still very early in development but we're making great progress.

Meetings

We didn't have a meeting this week because we were actively keeping each other up to date on #windev on IRC.

Next update

I'll be away next week so probably won't write another update for a couple weeks. Feel free to email me if you'd like to get involved.

As of Monday of this week, development work began on Firefox for Metro.

A bit of background on Windows 8 Metro and Firefox

It turns out that on Windows 8 there are 3 types of applications:

1. Classic desktop applications
2. Metro applications
3. Metro style enabled desktop browsers

Firefox will fall into the third category, meaning you can run Firefox as a desktop application, and you can run it as a Metro application. Supporting the Metro side of things will require a lot of new code, so this is a very large project.

Unlike Metro applications, Metro style enabled desktop browsers have the ability to run outside of the Metro sandbox. Meaning not only can we build a browser, but we can build a powerful browser which gives an experience equal to that of a classic Desktop browser.

Metro style enabled desktop browsers have access to most Win32 API and the entire new WinRT API.

Unfortunately a browser can only participate in Metro mode if it is the default browser. So if Firefox is not the default browser on a system, you can't use it in Metro mode. This is a decision made by Microsoft.

The Firefox Metro enabled desktop browser can be, and will be included and packaged in the traditional way. I'm not certain if it will be allowed on the Windows store or not since it is not of Metro application type.

Languages we'll be programming in

We will be using the Windows Runtime C++ Template Library (WRL) which is similar to C++ / ATL.

We may also be using C++/CX which does compile down to native code but has some non-standard C++ extensions that allow for code to be about 1/10 the size.

Our hesitation in using any C++/CX code is that it will definitely require a new build environment. Personally I think it would be worth using C++/CX in the long run. WRL and C++/CX code can freely be mixed even in the same source file.

The GUI will be made mostly by painting to DirectX. XAML may be used in a very limited fashion. XAML is the main presentation layer in Windows 8 Metro if you are using a .NET enabled language or native C++. XAML is a declarative XML-based language similar to Mozilla's own XUL. XAML is familiar to WPF and Silverlight developers. XUL will most likely still be rendered to the DirectX surface.

Windows 8 has a minimum requirement of hardware that supports Direct X 9 and I'm not aware of any alternative like GDI available. So the Direct X blacklist of graphic cards we currently maintain may not be applicable in Metro mode.

Development milestones

Our first major goal is to get an experimental build of Fennec or Firefox running in Metro. This work is mainly being tracked in Bug 732518.

To get started we read the MSDN whitepaper entitled Developing a Metro style enabled Desktop Browser. This document lacked quite a bit of information though so a lot of registry hacking was needed to get things working. Jim and I documented a lot of this missing information here and here.

Most of our week was spent with registry exports, diffs, Process Monitor logs, and other tools. The first couple minor goals were to get a recognized Metro tile showing up, getting it to launch our process, and then finally displaying a Metro app.

Jim and I hit those first milestones and made a basic application which launches in Metro mode as a medium integrity process. The application doesn't do anything exciting except display a DirectX surface and draw some text to the surface that tracks mouse movement.

As a developer, your job gets pretty hard when you do a Google search for topics surrounding this barely supported third Metro application type and consistently get zero, one, or if you are lucky, two search results. All results being only slightly on topic.

Next development steps

We have several smaller goals that we want to tackle next week:

• Figure out how to make our own PRI files with our own resources.
• Get a C++/XAML application working
• Get our app launching through a delegate DLL instead of an EXE
• Figure out how to interop XAML / DirectX.
• Start to figure out how we will paint content to our DirectX surface with the graphics layer
• Figure out how to implement other contracts
• Look into native theme rendering
• Probably others

Meetings

We had our first weekly developer meeting half way through the week with attendees: Robert Strong, Tim Abraldes, Jim Mathies and myself (Brian R. Bondy).

Helping out

We're still extremely early in development so we're not ready for help with things like how the UI should look yet.

If you want to help with the development effort to get Firefox up and running in Metro, we'd love to hear from you. Please sync up with us in #windev on IRC or email me directly at netzen at gmail.com.

I just wanted to post a quick follow up to my Firefox on Windows 8 post on how Thunderbird works with screenshots.

As with Firefox and other applications, as soon as you install Thunderbird it shows up as a Tile in the metro interface.

Clicking on it exits the tablet metro interface and goes into the old interface and launches Thunderbird.

One important thing is that if you click on a mailto: link in Internet Explorer it won't launch the default mail client. Instead it prompts with this error:

Windows Internet Explorer
Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not properly installed.

Here's a screenshot of that error message:

I assume once this registration problem is fixed it'll launch the Desktop mode and then launch the email client. It would be nice to have a metro interface for Thunderbird as well.

Perhaps even a metro style compose email window application only for when a user is browsing in tablet full screen mode and they click to send an email with their default email client.

Related Bug:

• Bug 686836 - Launching default email client in Windows 8 results in error

As you probably already know, Windows 8 introduces the new default Tablet interface, and the old normal Desktop interface. It uses the new tablet interface as the startup interface even on Desktops though. For a good rundown on all of the new features, see here.

When you first boot up into Windows 8, it takes you briefly for about 1/2 of a second to the desktop interface and then switches directly to the tablet interface. I had read previously that the desktop/explorer process was only loaded into memory if you clicked it, but it seems to not be the case for this early pre-beta release.

The next thing you notice is that once in the Desktop interface, the start menu button no longer brings up a menu. It brings you back to the tablet interface. Pressing the Start/Windows keyboard button will take you between the 2 interfaces.

Firefox on Windows 8:

The first thing I did was install Firefox.

After installing Firefox, Windows will ask you which web browser you would like to use by default. It shows you a picture of Firefox and IE and lets you pick. Nice interface. It shows you this dialog even before our process starts. If you change focus to another tab or application though, the dialog goes away forever unless you uninstall and reinstall Firefox.

After installing we show automatically into the tablet interface as a new tile.

But when you click on the Firefox icon in the tablet interface, it takes you directly to the old Desktop environment and loads the Firefox process as normal. I think it'll be possible for integration like IE does into the tablet interface direclty. Although the solution may have to be 'creative'.

Full screen mode in Firefox works the same as previous versions currently. If you start in full screen it will switch you first to the Desktop mode, and then launch full screen. Exiting full screen leaves you at the Desktop interface.

Internet Explorer Tablet Mode:

If you start Internet Explorer from the tablet mode you'll see a full screen app with no switch to Desktop. It has a nice interface and allows you to pin any web page to your Tablet interface as a tile.

The problem with this is that even know I set Firefox as my default browser, through the Windows interface, it still launches IE for these shortcut tiles.

Here is a tile created on the far left from a pinned page in IE of the mozilla.org page:

Work to be done for Firefox on Windows 8:

There's probably a ton, but here are a few things that come to mind:

• We need to support the VS2011 developer tools for MozillaBuild
• It would be nice to not need to switch to Desktop to launch the browser.
• Platform integration for apps seems very important. We should be showing up as tiles for web applications that launch Firefox full screen.
• The Firefox tile can be leveraged to have more functionality built into it.

Related bugs:

• Bug 686835 - Investigate using XPCOM in a metro style application, and providing Firefox as a Metro app
• Bug 686837 - Add VS2011 support for mozilla-build
• Bug 686839 - Investigate Windows 8 metro tile integration
• Bug 686840 - Investigate the ability to toggle between a metro app and a native app