Firefox/Planning/2011-07-06

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde Conference Room
• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 8605 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8605 (US)
• irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
• (the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

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Actions from Last Week

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Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 4.0, 5.0)

• Talking about creating a 5.0.1 for a 10.7 crasher bug 663688. The issue is in Apple’s 10.7 GM code (to be released in July, probably soon) and we have 2 ways to work around:
  1. Turn off downloadable fonts for users on 10.7
  2. Switch font rendering frameworks for users on 10.7 (ATS → CGFont)
• Aurora and Beta are not affected as we took the font rendering framework change there
• Deciding what to do for release by tomorrow
• Ideally would like to release the 5.0.1 update only to Mac users

Beta (6)

• Source migration completed successfully yesterday
• We built last night, waiting on QA’s signoff before offering to the beta audience
• Remember, the source migration date may be different than the date an update is offered to channel users

Aurora (7)

• Source migration completed successfully yesterday
• We built last night, waiting on QA’s signoff before offering to the aurora audience
• Remember, the source migration date may be different than the date an update is offered to channel users
• Uplifted about 2,100 changesets from 250 engineers for about 1,100 features and fixes.

Nightly (8)

• Didn’t close the tree during the source code migration, mozilla-central is chugging along nicely

Firefox Mobile

5

Firefox 5 launched two weeks ago (sim-ship with desktop)

6

Went to build yesterday (July 5), currently in QA. Will publish as BETA to Android Market as soon as we get QA sign-off – tonight or tomorrow – sim-ship with desktop (see Release Schedule). This will update Beta in Android Market, bridging the current gap (official release is newer than the current Firefox 5 Beta)

New features in 6:

• Better first-run experience – guide showing Browser Tools and features, faster start using less memory
  
• Higher-quality image scaling (on devices with NEON-compatible processors).[When zoomed in our out, less pixelation, crisper display of logos, etc.]
  
• Improvements for large-screen tablets [Optimizing Firefox for larger tablet devices, e.g. by adjusting UI elements, buttons, font size. (Phase 1)]
• Improved Form Helper [Form helper is less obtrusive on Android now]
• Theme changes for phones running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) [Now refreshed to look even more beautiful on Gingerbread OS.]
• Fixed bugs: Optimized rendering of pages that use RTL layout (languages like Arabic, Hebrew) [Universal access]
  
• Touch Events (part 1 – single touch only). [Expose touch events to content for better interaction with web pages and services, and compatibility with WebKit/Opera and existing web content.]
• IndexedDB database storage for web pages. [Pick up where you left off (e.g after crash or when terminated in the background (adding session history. Currently only saves last URL), better performance and memory management]
• Automatic text hyphenation with the -moz-hyphens CSS property (bug 253317).

7

moved to AURORA yesterday, July 5, 2011 (see Release Schedule)

Some new items:

• Selecting text in web content
• Locale selection during firstrun
• Publish in Android Market?

8

moved to NIGHTLY yesterday, July 5, 2011

Some new items:

• Tablet UI
• Pull locales from AMO
• Basic webapp support
• Use doorhangers?

Firefox Sync

• Beta (6) – Sync Discovery
• Aurora (7) – Instant Sync
• Firefox Sync Add-on EOL Plan – Phase 1
• Next major feature is Improving Sync Set Up
  • Nailing down requirements
  • Doing User Research for Mobile Sync Set up

Add-on Builder Beta!

Add-on SDK 1.1

• progress on a variety of mostly minor enhancements and bug fixes
• still looking for feedback on proposed new Jetpack/Development Process
  • post feedback to Jetpack thread or dev.planning thread
• working on feature pages for the next six to twelve months of development

Input 4.3

• ETA: 7/14
  • Complications occurred on 4.2 release with Elastic Search and metrics production clusters, so had it disabled. Looking to have it up in the next release.
  • Grouperfish will land in 4.3.

Feedback Summary

• Addon Compatibility: Google Toolbar, Roboform, Tiddlysnip
• Website Compatibility: Bitdefender scanner, FAFSA

Press & Public Reactions

• Memory improvements coming to Firefox 7
• Is Firefox hogging RAM? Memory Restart can fix that
• Firefox improves memory use
• Fixes to memory footprint land in Firefox 7

• Firefox JavaScript PDF Rendering Is Compelling
• Mozilla Announces, Demonstrates Pixel Perfect Firefox PDF Reader

Questions, Comments and Highlights

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