Sencha Touch, WebKit and Firefox

[cavalleydude]

I've been looking for the definitive answer regarding the Touch library and it's ability to work in Firefox browsers. I've read multiple posts that state Touch is for browsers based on WebKit, and that seems to excludes Firefox.

Is there any way to make it work on Firefox today (via a plug-in, etc)? Are there plans for Firefox support in the future?

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Scott

[VinylFox]

There is no easy way and there is also no motivation to make it work in FireFox since there are no mobile devices that use the Gecko layout engine.

[cavalleydude]

That's too bad. I like the ability to write the app once using the Touch framework and having the app format for the device {iPhone, Android, iPod, iPad, Desktop }. But, having to tell all users that FF is not supported is tough. Hopefully FF will enable WebKit in the near future. I'll check with the FF support group.

Thanks for the answer.

[mitchellsimoens]

I doubt FireFox will ever "enable" WebKit. Sencha has blogged about wanting HTML5 to be more supported by all browsers so that they wouldn't have to rely on "-webkit*"

[web4everyone]

There is no easy way and there is also no motivation to make it work in FireFox since there are no mobile devices that use the Gecko layout engine.

There may not be many of them compared to iOS and Android based devices, but there are mobile devices using gecko for their default web browser and firefox mobile is widely available.

-posted from my N900

[gcallaghan]

I've been interested in this too. I haven't had a chance to take a look but I think that the place to start would be the sass files used to generate the css, specifically...

$experimental-support-for-mozilla: false;
$experimental-support-for-opera: false;
$experimental-support-for-microsoft: false;
$experimental-support-for-khtml: false;

...found in resources/themes/stylesheets/sencha-touch/default/core/_core.scss

Note, this is completely beyond the use case, is unsupported, and I haven't even tried it, so you mileage may vary on this rough terrain should you choose to pursue it. But let me know how it goes ;-)

Also, I could be completely wrong.

[VinylFox]

There may not be many of them compared to iOS and Android based devices, but there are mobile devices using gecko for their default web browser and firefox mobile is widely available.

-posted from my N900

Wow, an N900. I thought the Maemo OS was long dead - even they replaced their Gecko based browser with an Opera based one like 2 years ago.

Either way, the percentage of mobile devices less than 2 years old using gecko is so amazingly tiny. I don't know of a single one.

[mitchellsimoens]

In a perfect world, each browser would work exactly the same or close to it but that just isn't the case. On mobile devices, WebKit has so much more majority than any other that it's just not a good idea to compromise to include the very very small percentage of devices.

[cavalleydude]

Found a way to use Touch on IE6+

See this link

http://www.sencha.com/forum/showthread.php?126025-Enable-IE6-to-work-with-Sencha-Touch!

[keithoth]

The only way to get websockets to work in a mobile web application with sencha touch is with firefox. Firefox 4 mobile is the best mobile browser for the android. Sencha should support and android should make it the default browser for all android devices, unless google wants to create a mobile chrome.