Meeting Notes Meetings notes from the Mozilla community

17-November-2011

Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2011-11-16

Filed under: Posts — Tags: — Jesper Kristensen @ 12:00 am

Firefox/Planning/2011-11-16


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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
  • irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
  • (the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

Video/Teleconference Details – NEW

  • 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 95312 (US/INTL)
  • 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312 (US)
  • Vidyo Room: Warp Core
  • Vidyo Guest URL
REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren’t able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

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Actions from Last Week

  • Johnathan to talk to engagement about bug 682944, and our process for snippet QA
    • Getting traction from Michael Kelly – we understand what caused this issue, but there’s more to be done setting up real snippet QA

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 8)

  • Qualifying / testing a 8.0.1
    • Apple released a Java update with a bug that activated a bug in Firefox
    • Working on a block for older versions of RoboForm, which is making some Windows users unstable
    • Still qualifying / testing the builds, may need to respin
      • (catlee) – when is the earliest we would be respinning? (background: RelEng has a downtime scheduled for Thurs morning that many in this room are blocked on; want to do this downtime after 9.0b2 builds complete and before possible 8.0.1respin – possibly today!)
    • Don’t have a date/time for Firefox 8.0.1’s release yet
  • The Firefox 3.6.x → 8 advertised MU has been postponed
    • We need to be 100% on release for a week to be sure no issues will arise. We have not been due to investigating a possible 8.0.1
    • Most likely will not wait for Fx9, but it won’t be this Thursday as previously scheduled

Beta (9)

  • Sent the go to build for Firefox 9 beta 2, QA should have the builds by tomorrow at the latest
    • This is the regular plan (go sent on Tuesday, builds by Thursday, push to the channel by Friday)

Aurora (10)

  • Web Developers should check out the new Aurora build. A Mozilla Hacks blog post runs through the improvements
    • New page inspector with features for working with CSS
    • Improvements to Scratchpad and Web Console

Nightly (11)

  • Add-ons compatible by default has landed preffed off on m-c and will land ASAP on Aurora. To enable this flip the pref extensions.strictCompatibility to true. With the pref flipped, Firefox should treat add-ons as compatible unless:
    • the author has opted in to strict checking
    • the add-on uses binary components
    • the add-on’s min version is greater than the Firefox version
    • the add-on is ancient
  • 5 digit bug 92264 “Support element.outerHTML property” landed.

Firefox Mobile

Release

Beta

Aurora

  • Must disable Flash

Trunk

Native UI

  • Massive Flash improvements landed this week. Give it a try, be blown away. Then go thank snorp.
  • Panning and Zooming infrastructure landed and caused some regressions. We are working to fix them ASAP and end up being much nicer than anything you have seen before.
  • Figure out the priority of ICS support given that phones are shipping.
  • File bugs

Top customer pain points and plans to fix

Context: 1,101 reviews were posted on Android Market during first week of v8 release, 21% of those reviews were 1 or 2 star reviews. Overall, for the first week, the average rating for v8 is 3.75 stars

  1. Performance (startup and lag) 51% of 1 & 2 star reviews on the Android Market for Firefox 8 in the first week of release complain about slow performance on startup and laggy responsiveness. Native UI is in-progress to fix.
  2. Instability (freezes/hangs/crashes) 11% of 1 & 2 star reviews of v8 complain about instability
  3. Memory 5% of 1 & 2 star reviews of v8 complain about high memory use Native UI is in-progress to fix.
  4. Flash 21% of 1 & 2 star reviews of v8 request support for Flash. Native UI is in-progress to fix.

Firefox Sync

  • Firefox 10:
    • Improving Sync Set Up – Went into Aurora. Working with Support to make sure we update docs appropriately
  • Firefox 11+:
    • Push to Device – In development. You can play with an add-on here. Signing off on UX
    • Addon Sync – In development, signing off on UX.
    • Java Porting for Sync – is in progress

Add-on Builder

  • Release today includes major search improvements, landing of the Jinja conversion, and more elements of our new Shipyard framework.
  • Drafted proposal for our 2012 development focus –> Builder will transition to an open web app, we’ll modularize add-on specific logic so Builder works for all kinds of apps, will be accessible from within Firefox itself.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.2 -> Firefox 7, 8)

  • 1.2 still passes tests for Firefox 9 (no repack will be needed if still OK when 9 releases)

Stabilization (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

  • Released 1.3RC1 yesterday
  • May spin another RC before release to take a couple of cherry-pick items
  • Still on track to release November 29th

Development (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

  • We remain on track to merge to stabilization branch on Tuesday, November 29 and ship on Tuesday, January 10
  • Had a meeting today to discuss our Out-of-process work and how our priorities will change with the change to e10s work. Look for a discussion on the Jetpack forum soon! – Update Discussion is here

Feedback Summary

Desktop

  • Haven’t had much time to work on feedback. Cursory look:
    • Lots of complaints about missing icons (but the majority — if not everyone — is just people reacting to the change from the default icon to the dotted icon)
    • Java functionality (not the Mac thing, I think more confusion around the add-on notice)
    • Startup crashes (yay!)
    • The usual addons don’t work.
    • We might have a problem with Outlook Web Access and downloading attachments: [1] and [2] bug 703015

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Technology

  • Amazon started shipping the Kindle Fire, and released the source code for it.
  • A survey of mobile developers found that nearly all are interested in developing for the Apple iPad, and the Kindle Fire is second-most-popular Android device, with 43% of developers saying they are “very interested” in developing for it.
  • Adobe announced that it was going to open source the Flex SDK and hand it over to the Apache Software Foundation, saying that “in the long term, we believe that HTML5 will be the best platform for enterprise software development”.
  • Google released updated version of the Android Native Development Kit, now at revision 7. It features a new API based on Khronos OpenMAX AL 1.0.1 that provides a direct, efficient path for low-level streaming multimedia, making it easier for applications to apply proprietary encryption/decryption. There are also audio enhancements.
  • Opera released version 11.60 of its browser, the first to support the HTML5 microdata specification and the CSS3 radial gradiants specification. It also supports the CSS4 image-rendering property, allowing customization of which scaling algorithm is used for background images, canvas elements, or border images.
  • MoSync, a Swedish startup, released a new version of its mobile framework which allows HTML5 and C++ to used seamlessly together in the same application, allowing developers to extend applications with native device features, many of which are not yet enabled in mobile browsers. The code is released with a GPL v2 license and works on Apple and Android devices.
  • Commits to the Chromium tree include partial support for Esperanto, default “strict blocking” for those who enable third-party cookie blocking, and compound keys for IndexedDB.
  • Google released a tool for working with CSS to its Closure product. Closure Stylesheets “adds variables, functions, conditionals, and mixins to standard CSS. The tool also supports minification, linting, RTL flipping, and CSS class renaming”.

Mobile

  • Coming soon…

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

  • Christian and Laura to figure out where to blog about Add-ons compatible by default (to get more testers enabling the feature once it is on Aurora)
  • blassey to report back on disabling flash on Aurora (XUL) Fennec
  • Christian to add explanation of new permissions requests to mobile beta release notes (bug 702183)

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