As you probably heard animated PNG images (APNG) have been standardized! So here's a story on how I used an APNG file to cut a phone's power consumption by 10 times in a common scenario during the weeks leading up to the launch of Firefox OS 1.0. We'll talk about webpage layout, rendering, mobile hardware intricacies, driver bugs and of course APNG files. 🧵 1/16
Discussion
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@gabrielesvelto I still remember #FirefoxOS and I'm still mad at @Mozilla / @mozilla_support / #Mozilla for self-sabotaging because neither me nor @fuchsiii nor anyone else I knew who did #WebDev / #AppDev / #MobileDev could even buy a device.
- The only device that I was aware of launched in the #EU was a #SimLock'd & #NetLock'd #prepaid phone in #Spain which wouldn't sell it to us since they demanded #KYC with a spanish residency address.
I mean it's cool that one could just use #Firefox as #Emulator but no #mobile#OperatingSystem will have any chance of market attraction if one cannot buy the bloody thing!
@gabrielesvelto @wezm I remembered an animated png being used by Trello. First and last time I noticed them.
A bit of background first: we're in early 2013, people at Mozilla - including yours truly - are scrambling to finalize version 1.0 of Firefox OS. The very first commit to the repo dated back to the 25th of July 2011. It takes a lot of effort and several miracles to ship a mobile operating system in under 18 months. Doubly so if the team is so small that almost everybody knows each other. 2/16
As a reminder, Firefox OS was a mobile operating system that was entirely based on web technologies. Everything you saw on the screen was HTML & CSS, and every line of code that was being executed in the UI was written in JavaScript. It was a huge bet in an age where web standards were still missing a lot of important functionality that we would have needed, and when phones were vastly slower than they are now. 3/16
Back to our timeline, Mobile Word Congress 2013 is in February, the entire team is in Berlin for a workweek and we literally have only one week to iron out all the remaining issues. We need to cut a 1.0 release and hand it over to the vendors that will be shipping the phones. And several of those issues are related to power consumption. We have to guarantee that we don't drain the phone battery during the most common activities: browsing, watching videos, etc... 4/16
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