Meeting Notes Meetings notes from the Mozilla community

23-February-2012

Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-22

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

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-22

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Planning Meeting Details

  • Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
  • Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
  • Toronto Offices: Finch 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.

Contents

Actions from Last Week

  • cheng to dig into connection reset issues with SSL
    • Looks like it’s probably related to just a few specific sites. FWIW, complaints seem to have died down this week so dunno (although a few of the previous threads ended in “I’m just switching to Chrome”)
  • irina to let us know whether dolphin for iOS uses Sync
    • Dolphin can sync data in 2 ways: through a feature inside the browser which is called Dolphin Connect and through an add-on which is called Firefox Sync for Dolphin HD, which is the one using our mechanism. Dolphin Connect can only sync bookmarks and it is present on iOS and Android inside the browser. The add-on, Firefox Sync for Dolphin, is not present on iOS, only on Android.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

  • FF 3.6.27 and FF/ESR 10.0.2 released last Friday due to security concerns
  • FF 3.6.27 -> FF 10.0.2 MU pushed out last week as well

Beta (11)

  • Firefox 11 Beta 4 will be released Friday
  • Firefox 11 code freeze is a little over a week away, on Friday 3/2
  • Effort underway to bring old beta users to the latest version using automatic updates (typically used for minor updates) as opposed to advertised updates
    • This is a more aggressive approach since incompatible add-ons will not be reported prior to update, and the update is automatically downloaded.

Aurora (12)

Nightly (13)

Some nice UI cleanup and beginning Australis prep work has happened in the last week.

  • Dão fixed bug 702225 – Implement revised nav bar button appearance on Windows and bug 631250 – Status overlay switches to right side of window when find bar is open and bug 727793 – Status panel tracks the mouse position on the wrong side when using a RTL locale
  • heycam fixed bug 674370 – [10.7] Support animation when opening windows in Lion
  • Jared fixed bug 709182 – “connecting” in tab title when reloading is unnecessary visual noise and bug 722681 – Show the tab close button immediately when the second tab of a window is opened
  • mak fixed bug 720258 – Inline autocomplete should only autocomplete URLs you’ve typed
  • ttaubert fixed bug 725200 – about:newtab briefly shown in location bar of new tab
  • Joshua M fixed bug 726259 – bookmarks toolbar top border and bug 729293 – Reduce border-radius on nav-bar to match Australis design

Firefox Mobile

DID YOU KNOW? Firefox with native Android widgets supports add-ons! It’s true.

  • Working on gl-layers (Maple), Sync features, UI responsiveness, and stability
  • Working on MWC readiness bug list
  • Native is planned for Fx13

Firefox Sync

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

Identity

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Mobile

Just read the wiki.

  • Top dissatisfiers on mobile according to the android market continue to be flash and performance-related issues. New filtering of android market reviews is now available, making it much easier to assess the negative reviews and get more data about makes/models for each review, so the analysis going forward should be a richer set of data.
  • Re-planning documentation updates for tablet to match new schedule for nativeUI (we scaled back tablet changes because of nativeUI, now that nativeUI has slipped, tablet docs could use some love).
  • Working on docs for add-ons, security and privacy for nativeUI beta.

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Adobe

  • Adobe released a roadmap for Flash, which focuses on improved support for gaming and video. At the same time, they announced via a blog post that in future, only the version of Flash for the Pepper Plugin API will be supported on Linux, effectively meaning that Flash will only be available on the platform with Google Chrome or Chromium. After version 11.2, the NPAPI version of Flash will only receive security updates.

Google

  • Google was the subject of a significant amount of press coverage this week when the Wall Street Journal revealed that Google’s +1 button system was taking advantage of a WebKit bug in Safari to allow scripted POST calls to override the browser’s rules on third-party cookie collection. Microsoft made a similar claim that Google’s incorrect use of HTTP P3P headers allowed it to set third-party tracking cookies. Google replied that the Wall Street Journal story “mischaracterized what happened and why” and that MSIE’s implementation of P3P is not functional in today’s web.
  • CNET interviewed Google Chrome VP Sundar Pichai. He noted that Chrome is part of a larger ecosystem that includes Native Client, the Chrome Web Store, Chromebooks and Google Apps, all of which he said have long run revenue opportunities. He also said that Google has always taken an open, standards-based approach to their initiatives, that they see businesses and schools as solid opportunities for Chromebooks, and that upcoming improvements will feature a significant amount of GPU rendering to improve the experience on slower hardware like Chromebooks. Newer, faster Chromebooks will be arriving soon, which will support 64-bit architectures.
  • A Google Chrome engineer made an interesting blog post about how Chrome on Android handles low memory situations — it first selectively kills background tabs, then clears memory caches and performs garbage collection. Finally, when the system can allocate memory no more, it kills Chrome’s renderer process in which the web page lives. Many mobile browsers would crash entirely, but due to Chrome’s multiprocess architecture, the browser keeps running and displays the “Aw, Snap!” page.
  • The Google Dart team released an initial development version of “Dartium”, a version of Chromium that includes the Dart virtual machine. Currently only available in Mac and Linux builds.
  • Google announced that that their public DNS service now receives 70 billion requests a day, with 70% of traffic coming from outside the USA.
  • The Chrome team is also proposing a feature in Chrome that would automatically generate passwords. They describe their longer-term goal as OpenID, but this feature as a necessary interim stopgap for improved security.

Microsoft

  • Microsoft quietly announced that consumer security support for Windows 7 and Windows Vista would be extended from five years to ten.
  • Microsoft, in a blog post, described how they built a MSIE performance testing data center of 140 machines hosting a “mini-Internet. It tests the performance of builds 200 times daily, collecting over 5.7 million measurements and 480GB of runtime data each day from 850 different types of metrics.

Apple

  • Apple released a developer preview of Mountain Lion, the upcoming version of OS X to be released this summer. At this stage it looks like the most significant change for Safari will be an integrated search / address bar.

Opera

  • Opera purchased two mobile advertising companies.
  • An independent developer, using Opera’s APIs, released a product equivalent to Firefox Home on iOS. Opera Link is available in the Windows Phone Market.

Security

  • McAfee released their 2011 Q4 Quarterly Threat Report (PDF report). The number of malicious URLs continues to rise, jumping by more than 5 times during 2011, to more than 700,000 active malicious URLs.
  • Adobe patched seven critical vulnerabilities in Flash Player that took advantage of a cross-site scripting bug in MSIE. Adobe noted that even if its upcoming sandboxed MSIE Flash Player was available, the XSS-based attacks would still have worked.

WebKit

  • In WebKit development this week, the Web Inspector now has a tool for reviewing IndexedDB databases, as well as a color picker, and two new CSS properties were added: -webkit-line-grid and -webkit-overflow-scrolling, and all HTML elements now support the translate attribute. Support for the CSS calc() function and the VibrationAPI also arrived.

Tizen

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

  • Rumours on Jelly Bean launch next quarter not likely to be true
  • Tegra 3 devices coming out this quarter
  • Opera bought 2 mobile advertising agencies to focus on the US and European markets
  • Next version of OS X goes towards deeper integration with iOS and iCloud
  • RIM released BlackBerry Playbook OS 2
  • Ubuntu for Android was announced
  • Browsing patterns on mobile similar during the weekdays and the weekend
  • Kindle Fire accounted for 36% of tablet app sessions in Jan 2012, on par with the Samsung Galaxy Tab

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

(Just read the wiki)

  • In the thick of getting ready for the next release – website, blog, etc.
  • Updated ads to 3.6 Upgrade Campaign, will be live for the next few weeks

Mobile

  • Finalizing MWC Fennec demo scripts
  • Beta/final release re-planning
  • Media campaign for tablets campaign wrap up and analysis

Press

Questions, Comments, FYI

  • (johnath) running this meeting next week during MWC?

Actions this week

  • lawrence/cheng to come back on uptick in perf concerns on FF11 input
Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2012-02-22“

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