Participation/Chota-fennec

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Chota Fennec

Chota Fennec is the code name for a project that aims to build a slimmed down leaner and faster Firefox for Android targeted towards bandwidth conscious markets. The idea behind Chota-fennec is to make a feature streamlined version of Firefox for Android which is not only slimmer in download size, but also considerably lighter on the device.

Here's the current documentation: https://participation.etherpad.mozilla.org/firefox-mini?

Context

Fennec is a relatively large browser in the South Asian market:

Browser and their sizes on playstore:

1. Opera - 20MB (3 MB - Mini)
2. UC - 15 MB (0.9 MB - Mini)
3. Firefox - 33 MB (biggest)
4. Chrome - 30 MB

While others offer data compression through their proxy servers and make their browser more adjusted to data sensitive users, Fennec does not have that option.

The aim of this project is to explore options to prototype a product that is smaller in size and helps data sensitive users manage better their data.

The Fennec team had explored this possibility and they have put together a list of bugs that aim towards this goal: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fatfennec

The idea is not to fork Fennec but to build with the existing modules.

Ideas

These are just raw uncategorized, unexplored and unprioritized ideas for chota fennec:

Server side compression

• Server side compression (maybe the only open source server side comp. project )
  • Need to be taken into consideration:
    • The privacy of data is going to matter when we talk about the browser-side-compression
    • Browser-side-compression demands high-throughput/efficiency data-center to serve content
    • Data retention policy?
    • Costs
    • legal implications

Network

• Slow network detector
• Some (magical) network optimization

Display / Rendering

• Offer to render page in text only (something like reading mode)
• Strip ads/flash/fonts/any media
  • click to play feature?
• Avoid the loading loading

Downloads

• Better download manager
• We Indians "download" a lot of .... media (:P)
• Resumable downloads

Strip down features, languages

• scale down the features with a Mini version
• strip out other languages
  • Strip out Non-Indian Locales , But Keep Indian ones. Also strip out locales without Android device font support.
  • Make sure , we can provide features such as @font-face support in optional features, with disable by default . Else it may break UI/UX of Indian language websites and it may backfire

come up with a realistic set of functionality to create a really really small .apk size

• There can be a lot of optimizations made, based on the target demographics - as prefs
• It may be helpful to have the pref-bundles (like language packs) to serve certain regions

Help wanted and how to join

The chota fennec team started as a team of mainly engineers, but there is need for help in these areas:

• Product management / coordination
• QA
• Release management
• Coding

You can join the team on telegram: https://telegram.me/joinchat/03640302006e3486f7e1e5f99fca4a21