Firefox OS simulator can now simulate app purchases

As Firefox OS phones arrive in markets, the Firefox OS simulator has had an update which will help developers who are planning to make money with their HTML5 apps. In version 4.0 of the Firefox OS Simulator, which runs as an add-on to desktop Firefox, there is now the ability to download and install the three varieties of receipt that the Mozilla Marketplace can issue. The app dashboard lets a developer select a receipt (valid, invalid or refunded) and the simulator restarts with that type of receipt in place. This allows the behaviour of trial, purchased and refunded applications to be tested.

Other enhancements in the simulator include a connect button per app which launches a developer toolbox view specific to that app, support for remote CSS styling using the Nightly/Aurora Firefox build's new Style Editor tool, and a quick keyboard shortcut to completely refresh an app, clearing all its local storage at the same time. Finally, using the mouse to interact with the simulator now generates "real" touch events rather than the mouse events previously generated. As well as fixing issues with core apps that relied on touch interactions, it means that testing interaction with your own applications is more realistic and doesn't rely on what is a fallback behaviour on a phone.

The simulator is available to download from the Mozilla Add-ons site. Source code for the simulator is available from the project's GitHub repository and is mostly under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0.

(djwm)