Reminder: Source migrations are on 2011-09-27 @ 9:00 am PDT

Christian Legnitto

Just a reminder that on 2011-09-27 @ 9:00 am PDT (tomorrow) we will be migrating source code from mozilla-central to mozilla-aurora (and mozilla-aurora to mozilla-beta).

Fixes landed on mozilla-central before 9:00 am PDT will make it in Firefox 9, fixes after will make it in Firefox 10.

We’ll be following the checklist @ https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Merge_Checklist.

Firefox release candidate builds available

Christian Legnitto

As mentioned over on the add-ons blog we have a release candidate for the next version of Firefox! The most recent Firefox Beta is our release candidate. If no issues are found, this version will be released to all Firefox users on Tuesday, 2011-09-27.

If you aren’t running Firefox Beta and wish to help test, please download Firefox Beta from http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/beta.

What this means for you

Firefox Beta users

The Firefox Beta update we pushed on Monday is our release candidate. If you are running an up-to-date Firefox Beta you are already testing the release candidate…thanks! If not, open the “About” dialog to download the latest.

Any issues should be filed in Bugzilla or, if they seem particularly nasty, please feel free to send them to me directly.

Add-on developers

Please update your add-ons for Firefox 7 as soon as possible. The add-on team’s blog post has great information about what you need to do and where to find more information. We also have a curated list of changes you need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network.

Thank you very much for your heroic efforts and sticking with us through the new release process.  If you have any questions, please feel free to hop on irc.mozilla.org and join the #addons or #developers channel.

Web developers

Test your sites to make sure they still work. We have a curated list of changes you need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network. Please take a look. If you are using feature detection and writing to web standards you should generally be compatible. You should also check out the new web technologies you can play with. Oh look, we now support text-overflow: ellipsis too!

Any issues that look to be caused by Firefox should be filed in Bugzilla or, if they seem particularly nasty, please feel free to send them to me directly.

SUMO contributors

Stay vigilant. Please let us know any issues our Firefox Beta users find. Take a look at the curated list of changes you might need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network. Take a look at the bugs we are still tracking and see if you think any of them will become an issue when we release to everyone.

Enterprise deployments

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. If you hopped on the new release process train please take a look at the curated list of changes you might need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network. If you are still hanging out on Firefox 3.6, don’t fret! We will be releasing an update for Firefox 3.6 (hopefully) at the same time as we release this version, Tuesday, 2011-09-27. The new Firefox 3.6 version (currently called Firefox 3.6.23) will contain backports of the important security fixes in Firefox 7.

Our discussions on the Enterprise Working Group have told us you don’t generally qualify point releases. If you do you need to qualify this Firefox 3.6 security and stability update you can grab it from our ftp server. Also, be sure to check out our new proposal on how we might adjust the release process to accommodate your unique needs.

Firefox developers

There is more work to be done, but thanks for all you have done so far. Keep working on Firefox Nightly to make future versions of Firefox the best they can be, but take a moment to step back and revel in the fact that your amazing engineering ships to users in less than 1.5 years. Your work is making the web better not only for Firefox users, but for everyone.

Localizers

Sit back and relax. Soon we will be migrating mozilla-central to mozilla-aurora and you will have new UI and strings to play with, but for now bask in the hard work you have already done preparing to ship to hundreds of millions of people. We hope the predictability and consistency of the new release process has made your work easier and less stressful. Thanks so much for your hard work!

Firefox users

Hold tight! The courageous Firefox Beta testers are making sure everything works silky smooth for you. Once we get feedback from them you will have a great new version of Firefox delivered to your computer in the next week!

Aurora Channel/Triage Meeting Notes – August 30th, 2011

Christian Legnitto

This is a summary of the most recent Aurora channel meeting (notes are published on the wiki as well):

Giving QA a heads up

  • Matt was talking about a previous proposal to somehow surface fixes/features/risky items in a release that QA needs to test
  • smooney gave some background as not everyone was aware of the proposal
    • This proposal/conversation was not widely distributed
  • Discussion about if status and tracking flags handle this already
  • Generally qawanted, regression, and tracking-firefox# should be what QA needs to look at
  • Project pages should help with features as there will be more defined up front
  • Had a discussion about how ~1000 fixes are too much for QA to go through
  • johnath suggested it’s better to start at 1000 fixes and whittle down to ones that need special QA attention than to have Product Management  look at their 7-8 tracked features and figure out if there is something missing
  • juanb said he can look at a changelog and prioritize but contractors and newer people can’t do that as much
  • asa pointed out developers often underestimate potential risks (he had a disclaimer saying how much he loves developers BTW) so only relying on developers to surface items isn’t ideal
  • Christian said it needs to be a combination of feature pages, hg logs, qawanted, and tracking flags
  • Another problem was surfaced that we do not use the current flags the same way on Desktop and Mobile

Growing the Aurora audience

  • Grace gave a presentation about what product marketing is doing to grow the Aurora audience
    • Engineering previously set a goal of 1 million active daily Firefox Aurora users
    • Current audience grows ~5% a week organically
    • We see a bigger growth rate (~20%) for source migration weeks
      • Takeaway: users care about features and the additional word of mouth translates into Aurora users
    • Quarterly goal for Product Marketing is to have 300,000 active daily users on the Aurora channel
    • Grace will add the slides to the wiki page

Action items

  • Juan is going to post to dev-planning about better use of the qa-wanted flag
  • Christian to follow-up with the mobile team and hammer out a consistent system
    • He will then blog and post to dev-planning about it
  • Asa to work with ashughes and QA to review the list of changes which are not obviously part of feature pages and try and isolate/prioritize those that need attention
    • This will happen at/around the mozilla-central → mozilla-aurora source migration

Beta Channel/Triage Meeting Notes – August 29th, 2011

Christian Legnitto

This is a summary of the most recent Beta channel meeting (notes are published on the wiki as well):

Stability Status

  • Not sure how the GC frequency change affects crashes
    • Generally thought that out-of-memory crashes (with no signature) should go down
    • Generally thought that any GC-related crashes should go up (as we are GCing more frequently)
  • smooney says she needs to dig in more
  • #22 (#1 mac crash overall) Lion OSServices crasher still there, we will poke Apple to try to get it in a point release
    • Also looks to affect Chrome and Safari, should raise the issue some
  • There has been feedback about the way we are tracking Linux/Android crasheson dev-platform
    • The data is actually there and being looked at
    • smooney says they are going to start breaking down by platform when reporting in meetings and such, not exactly sure what they will look like yet though

Next beta build?

  • Do we wait until Wednesday or rush it because of the cert issue?
    • Decided to rush it, even though having beta users “exposed” for an extra 24/48 hours wouldn’t be super horrible (release users are generally thought to be most important)
    • Decided it was lower priority than release channels though
    • Mentioned that Nightly and Aurora should get the fix automatically due to automation
  • Do we want to make it 7.0b2 + the 1 fix or do we want to take everything else that has landed?
    • Looks like we only have 6 or so fixes since beta 2
    • Decided we need to test these fixes anyway and Beta users should be a little more risk tolerant
    • Christian will try to transplant anything outstanding

Meeting about meetings

  • Do the Aurora/Beta meetings make sense?
  • Deferred until later, we’ll maintain the status quo for now

The meeting was then followed by an exciting (not really) round of beta bug triage.