Mozilla fleshes out Firefox OS simulator features

From CNET News.com: Mozilla is at an awkward stage with Firefox OS: it wants its brand-new mobile operating system to attract developers, but there are very few phones available in the real world. To bridge the gap, the organization offers a phone simulator, and on Thursday, it updated the Firefox OS simulator to version 4.

Among the new features in the software, which is an add-on to the Firefox browser for personal computers, according to a blog post by Firefox OS developer advocate Angelina Fabbro:

• The ability to simulate touch-screen events with mouse clicks.

• A style editor tool that lets programmers create and test CSS formatting.

• The ability to test whether an app properly generates the receipt generated when an app is downloaded from the Firefox Marketplace.

• The ability to completely reset an app by typing Ctrl-R on Windows and Cmd-R on OS X. The command will wipe out all locally stored information.

Firefox OS runs Web apps on Mozilla's Gecko browser engine, so a lot can be simulated using the desktop browser. The simulator only goes so far, though. It can't be used to test some features that need a real phone, such as seeing how responsive a game app is when a person tilts the phone.

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