Firefox/Planning/2012-03-14

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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

Actions from Last Week

• Jorge to follow-up with Ant Downloader devs/plan of action (from desktop Feedback) and ensure beta and follow-on releases address identified issue(s)
  • The issue has been resolved with the latest Ant update.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 11, 10esr)

• FF11.0, FF10.0.3esr, and FF3.6.28 all went out yesterday
  • FF3.6.28 is our last planned 3.6 update
• We’re watching for 11 feedback as well as fallout from Patch Tuesday (even unrelated to Firefox)

Beta (12)

• FF12beta1 is with RelEng, expected to go out the door Thursday afternoon at the earliest

Aurora (13)

• bug 734946 Disable incremental GC for Firefox 13

• bug 735713 Version upgrades are broken
  • blocker for re-enabling Aurora updates

Nightly (14)

• bug 206438 Smooth scrolling should use the ‘smoothwheel’ algorithm

• bug 591884 Migration wizard does not import favorites toolbar from IE7, IE8, and IE9
• bug 712109 Implement non-fatal chromehang by turning on frame-pointers on a branch
• bug 729878 [New Tab Page] Implement new layout
• bug 718088 offer to re-set keyword.URL if it has a non-default value
• bug 717070 Create button to initiate migration to a clean Firefox profile
• bug 696301 Allow sites to enable x-domain window.onerror information
• Updates from 13.0a1 -> 14.0a1 are broken for windows users. bug 735713 Updates are currently disabled until a fix can be landed.

Firefox Mobile

• FF10.0.3 (XUL mobile) was pushed to the Android Market yesterday

• GL-layers code landed on m-c
  • Ongoing work will continue on m-c. The maple branch has been released.
• Schedule for first native release
  • we plan to ship mobile off of FF13, this will involve significant uplift to aurora over the next few weeks

  • We will probably ship 13 to our beta audience before desktop does
  • We may exit our beta cycle after desktop does

• New stuff in Nightly:
  • Tab Sync

  • Various startup speed improvements
  • Add search engine from text inputs
  • HTML5 form validation and <datalist> support
  • Add-on preferences
  • Editing bookmarks

Firefox Sync

• In Progress:

• App Sync for App store (‘aitc’, Apps In The Cloud)
  • for Marketplace, durable storage for app receipts

  • sync is not building the client portion, but the server
  • Android Sync
    • Only 1 native sync(fennec) per device!

    • Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
    • Big Fat Native Sync Beta Blocker triage happening today, ping ally for details
  • Sync 2.0 protocol/Persona(BrowserID) auth integration
    • will not be backwards compatible or interoperable with existing versions

    • representing significant changes on front & back ends
      • current 2.0 draft spec: https://github.com/mozilla-services/docs/blob/master/source/storage/apis-2.0.rst
    • if you know someone maintaining a sync client outside of Firefox Desktop & Android Sync, tell them to talk to :ally asap.
      • 2.0 will break their expected behavior

Add-on Builder

• Finish up remaining feature/dev work over the next month

• Generate a plan that details the long-terms support needs of the Add-on Builder site
• Begin spec’ing the ecosystem dashboard app

Add-on SDK

Release (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• All signs point to good

• Published a blog post outlining Add-on SDK compatibility & Firefox ESR to help answer questions

Stabilization (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Released 1.6b2 yesterday!

• Still on track to release 3 April, 2012

Development (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• We are testing to make sure we will support globals per compartment when it ships

• Still on track to merge 3 April, 2012

• We have a plan to have add-ons widgets at the top of the browser
  • Feature page here

  • Stephen Horlander’s excellent mockups here
  • Comments? Questions? Join the Discussion! (or find us on IRC in #jetpack)

Identity

Apps

• Apps missed the aggressive 13 branch cut-off date, but charging ahead to get patches queued up for review in the coming week or two.

• Marketplace Beta scheduled for April 26.
• GA at end of Q2.
• QA is helping test apps compatibility on gecko and filing bugs. Talk to Jason Smith or Lawrence Mandel for more details.
  • Working on a number of issues including incorrect UA sniffing, CSS transform performance, -webkit compat, and broken functionality
• If you are a developer, have you built an app for the Mozilla Marketplace yet?

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Copying from report to release-drivers:

Since we released late, a lot of this feedback is possibly from beta 8 or people who downloaded from alternate sources. In no particular order…

1) A few complaints about images set on a grey background (and a few people confused by that behavior). Suggesting an addon

• [1]

• [2]
• [3]
• [4]
• [5]

2) Firefox takes forever to load pages after update. This happened in the past when a firewall (zonealarm) throttled the new version of the software (it eventually resolves itself IIRC). But this one includes some non-windows complaints.

• [6]

• [7]
• [8] << blamed the update (beta
• [9] << clearly blamed the update

• [10] << another clear update-related
• [11] << maybe caused by ask toolbar
• [12]
• [13]
• [14] << linux
• [15] << mac
• [16]

3) Hangs with downloads (looks to be caused by scanning with Microsoft Security essentials):

• [17]

• [18]
• [19]
• [20]
• [21]
• [22]

4) Norton, AVG compatibility (there may have been one or two others, but Norton and AVG were the top ones)

• [23]

• [24]
• [25]
• [26]
• [27]
• [28]
• [29]
• [30]
• [31]
• [32]
• [33]
• [34]
• [35] << maybe lost passwords for norton?
• [36] << and one complaint that AVG takes over search

5) Pages pushed to the left edge (lots of Facebook but that could be a side effect). Could simply be a lack of CSS or partial CSS loading.

• [37] << FB

• [38] << CNN
• [39] << FB
• [40] << maybe google translate?
• [41] << FB
• [42] << yahoo
• [43] << FB (but only after a while)
• [44] << FB
• [45] << FB & hotmail

(possibly related: something up with google image search?)

• [46]

• [47]

6) Top site complained about: Facebook (a lot of can’t log in or X page/game won’t work). That’s probably par for the course, so I’m hesitant to say this is unusual, I’ll do a proper comparison to 9 and 10 releases to see if it’s worse than usual.

• [48]

New) Hangs/lags with scrolling:

• [49]

• [50]
• [51]
• [52]

Please don’t yell at me about formatting… I’m sleepy.

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• A bit of information regarding the ongoing US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of Google has been revealed. Apple has been received a subpeona to provide information that may show whether Google is abusing its dominance of Internet search to boost revenue in the mobile phone advertising market.

• The Chrome team has started work on embedding the Chrome to Mobile extension to within the browser itself. This functionality would use Google’s Cloud Print server to maintain a list of a user’s mobile devices and allow the user to easily send pages to them.
• The team has also added support for flow-control in SPDY version 3.0 to Chrome. A draft IETF specification version of the protocol has also been published.
• Work has also started on Bluetooth device support and USB device support in the browser.
• Google staffers also submitted a proposed Speech JavaScript API specification to the W3C. This API would allow web developers to incorporate speech recognition and speech synthesis into their web pages.
• Google team members (possibly on their own time) are also collaborating to produce an xterm-compatible terminal emulator and standalone ssh client for Chrome. It uses NativeClient to connect directly to ssh servers.
• Work has also started to implement one-click login to Chrome by prompting the user to log in every time she or he opens a Google property. In related news, development builds of the ChromeOS operating system can now automatically sync Google Docs documents to the local device.
• Google also confirmed that they are working on a version of Chrome for Windows 8 Metro.
• Google Product Manager Punit Soni said in an interview that the company is working on integrating its 4 separate gaming platforms this year. Analysts expect heavy use of both HTML5 and NativeClient technologies in an effort to better compete with Facebook. The company also registered dozens of related domain names.

Apple

• Apple released version 5.1.4 of Safari. The release is largely a security one with 83 security fixes, 72 of which could be considered critical.

Tizen

• Chinese manufacturer Huawei joined the Tizan Association and said they would produce Tizen phones.

• Here’s a video of short demo of Tizen that was made at an invite-only event at the Mobile World Congress.

Microsoft

• Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky posted a lengthy description of all the user interface design features of MSIE10.

Security

• The Pwn2Own contest was held at the CanSecWest conference. French security firm VUPEN won the contest by demonstrating zero-day exploits of Google Chrome and MSIE9. The second-place team also produced an exploit against Firefox, but it was one that was previously known and had been patched. The Chrome team suspected that VUPEN had used vulnerabilities in the Chrome Flash sandbox, and set a “trap” by including a particular signature for crashes, but unfortunately that had the unintended effect of causing a number of crashes for end-users. Google was unhappy with the the rules of the Pwn2Own event and sponsored their own, parallel contest called Pwnium, and awarded two developers $120,000 sandbox breaks, making a total of three. A Google developer at the event posted an interesting summary of his view of the Pwn2Own and Pwnium events to his Google+ feed.

• A study found that half of all rogue online pharmacies register their domains with just two registrars.
• Microsoft posted more information about current memory security measures and ForceASLR, a new loader option used by MSIE10 that instructs the operating system to randomize the locations of all modules loaded by the browser.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Chrome for Android updates include support for Android Beam and availability in more countries

• The Android Market was renamed to Google Play; now restricts use of 3rd-party in-app payment processors
• Ice Cream Sandwich updates rolling out to flagship Samsung and HTC devices
• The Google-Oracle trial concerning Java use in Android to start in April
• Opera adds Opera Mini Next as version for early-adopter feature preview
• Opera Mobile 12 adds WebGL and Camera API support
• Opera shows MIPS- and Intel-based versions of its mobile browser
• Android tablet sales will take over iOS by 2016, according to data released by IDC
• Latest iPad features a new display and a better camera; Samsung exec said to have confirmed an upcoming iPad Mini
• The Internet of Things arriving with new ARM processor designed for appliances
• The EC is questioning 5 telecom operators on standardization

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Starting work on next release.

• Continuing to work on upgrading 3.6.X users
• Finalizing Product Narrative for 2012

Mobile

• Finalizing product narrative for 2012

• Brainstorming launch campaigns
• Preparing Beta release activities

Press

• Firefox 11 up for grabs now, Chrome migration and more dev tools in tow

• Mozilla nixes Firefox 11 delay, will launch upgrade today
• After Delay, Firefox 11 Arrives With Add-on Sync, Dev Tools
• Mozilla knew of Pwn2Own bug before CanSecWest

• Mozilla begins development of Firefox for Metro

• Mozilla begins adapting Firefox for Windows 8 Metro environment

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Happy π Day

• Does anyone know an iOS developer community member? send them to :ally
• On the subject of the last 3.6, when do people think we should turn off server support for 3.6 sync?
• Firefox clinic NEXT Saturday in SF. Come! Email sumo-team@mozilla.com if you want to help.

Actions this week

• All of you, right now, fill out this survey (< 20 seconds!)

Firefox/Planning/2012-03-07

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

• Asa to follow up with Comms on announcing end of win2K support. For consumers, it’s time to upgrade your OS or move to Opera. For managed deployments, the ESR supports win2K for another 10 months or so.
  • Erica leading this. Will probably be combined with some other announcements.
• Kev to follow up with McAfee on error from Desktop Feedback
  • Per the SiteAdvisor product team, this was an error that occurred with users of 3.4, and updating to the latest version corrected it. The SiteAdvisor team responded in the SUMO question, and pushed an update to correct it without user intervention last week.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10, 10esr)

• Latest 10.0.3esr nightlies communicated to enterprise list on Monday (3/5)

• Beta of 3.6.28 going out today (3/7)

Beta (11)

• Firefox 11 sign-offs today (3/7) in Warp Core at 1PM PT

• Firefox 11 beta 6 expected to go out today (3/7)
• Final go-to-build for FF11 will be Friday (3/9)

• As a reminder, these are the products that we plan to ship
  • Firefox 11

  • XUL Fennec 10 off of ESR branch
  • Firefox 3.6.28
  • Firefox 10.0.3esr

Aurora (12)

• Silent Update: Removal of OS security dialog for Windows – remaining security work landed.

Nightly (13)

Firefox Mobile

Firefox Sync

• App Sync for App store
  • for Marketplace

  • durable storage for app receipts
  • sync is not building the client portion, but the server
• In Progress:
  • Android Sync
    • Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
  • Sync 2.0 protocol/Persona(BrowserID) auth integration
    • will not be backwards compatible or interoperable

    • representing significant changes on front & back ends
      • current 2.0 draft spec: https://github.com/mozilla-services/docs/blob/master/source/storage/apis-2.0.rst
    • if you know someone maintaining a sync client outside of Firefox Desktop & Android Sync, tell them to talk to me asap.
      • 2.0 will break their expected behavior

Add-on Builder

• Push today

• Working on a third-party library contest with the Add-ons team

Add-on SDK

Release (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• No issues to report

Stabilization (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Spinning up 1.6b1 today

• On track to release on 3 April, 2012

Development (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on 3 April, 2012

• We have places to track landing the loader & APIs in Fx

SDK-based Add-on of the week? Collusion!

Identity

The feature page for Sign Into The Browser has mock-ups!

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Top issues (1): Complaints about Ant Video Downloader not working (“it got automatically uninstalled”). They have a beta version that works great. [1]

• Still seeing the following issues: Babylon toolbar, searchqu, other search “features”, Foxtab.
• Noscript + Facebook + App Tabs = slow page loading [2]
• Localized builds updating to en-US is bug 727508, Secunia Personal security Inspector (PSI)

Firefox 11:

• Huge (20%) spike in positive feedback (probably because we pushed out localized “give us feedback” snippets. Jump was mostly in pt-BR (wow!) and de locales.

Mobile

UX & User Research

Welcome to Cori Schauer, our new senior user researcher. She will be working on Firefox and related issues.

The Mozilla Mobile Study was completed this week. We learned a lot about participants’ use of browsers and apps. We’re planning on presenting to various constituencies over the next few weeks, including mobile engineering and QA. Ping Mary to get invited.

Market Insights

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• A new Suggested pages feature landed in the Canary builds of Chrome. It’s not clear, but it appears that this feature will adaptively suggest web pages that the user should visit based on their browsing behavior.

• A ChromeOS Developer shared some screenshots of the upcoming “Desktop” mode for the operating system, complete with wallpapers, folders and window panels.
• Google announced that Android apps could now pass 50MB in size. Individual APKs still have this limit, but can have up to two additional “expansion files” of up to 2GB in size.
• Extensions for Google Chrome are now required to support the browser’s Content-Security-Policy. External research from UC Berkeley indicates that these three steps would prevent 96% of core extension vulnerabilities. Extensions will no longer be able to :

1. use inline scripts (“<script> … </script>”) and will have to load scripts from within their package

2. use eval()
3. plugins will only be able to loaded from within their package or from a whitelist of (Google-trusted) HTTPS hosts

• The BlitzTech Gaming engine and the Havok Physics Engine announced support for the NativeClient platform.

• At the same time, apps in the Chrome Web Store now have access to an improved In-App Payments solution
• Google announced that the US State Department had adopted Chrome as its default browser. Within two weeks 60% of the organization’s 58,000 desktops had been switched to the browser.
• Chrome’s Canary builds now support scoped stylesheets.
• The latest Chrome stable release includes 20 security fixes for which Google awarded $47,500 in bonuses to security researchers.
• Bonus: Google’s MWC 2012 wrapup video

Microsoft

• An MSIE developer posted a long list of the minor changes in MSIE10 that were released in the Consumer Preview. Among many other changes, Ctrl-U now opens the View Source window, as with many other browsers.

• The IE team released a TV commercial that celebrates the beauty of the web as experienced with MSIE.
• As part of the Consumer Preview release, the IE team developed new HTML5 test cases for the IE Testing Center. There’s now 7,548 of them there, with detailed summaries of how MSIE9, MSIE10, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome fare against them. They also released a short video demonstrating some of the new hardware accelerated CSS features, comparing them directly with Chrome.

Opera

• For those of you going to SXSW Interactive, check out Opera’s list of talks there.

Adobe

• Adobe released a security update for Flash. The update addresses two critical issues that were identified by Google security researchers.

Apple

• The US Patent Office granted Apple a patent with 76 claims involving tablet and smartphone user interfaces. One industry commentator described them as a “megaton bomb” for Apple. Another patent was awarded for an “iWallet” system for Apple.

• Spaceport.io released a benchmark study that measured how many sprites could be handled at 30fps. Apparently Mobile Safari on iOS could handle three times the number of sprites that the Android browser could. For the results of running this benchmark on a Windows 7 machine running Firefox 10 and Chrome 18, see here.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Marketing

Press

• Mozilla Firefox launches Collusion, new add-on that enables users to see who is tracking them

• Mozilla’s Big Plans for Tracking Who Tracks You Online
• Firefox Plug-in Reveals The Small Army Stalking You On The Web

Questions, Comments, FYI

• How/where can I contact the Adblock Plus? does he exist on teh IRCs? (ally)

• Apps is making changes to Firefox desktop and mobile and integrates (or will soon) with both. I propose that we add Apps to the upcoming releases. Does this seem beneficial to this group? (lmandel)

Actions this week

• Jorge to follow-up with Ant Downloader devs/plan of action (from desktop Feedback) and ensure beta and follow-on releases address identified issue(s)

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-29

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

• kev to totes run the meeting this week (with closing dance number)

• lawrence/cheng to come back on uptick in perf concerns on FF11 input
  • Sent email to release-drivers, there are some issues with telemetry but there’s not much we can do about it now.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10, 10esr)

• No new issues to report w/r/t 3.6.27 and 10.0.2

• Expecting go-to-build for 3.6.28, 10.0.3esr on Friday March 2nd

Beta (11)

• Firefox 11 beta 5 will be shipped Friday

• Friday is also our FF11 code freeze date
• Final sign-offs will be held next Wednesday

Aurora (12)

Nightly (13)

• bug 711193 – turn on “don’t load tabs until selected” by default

• bug 469434 – links in “view source” should have “copy link location” in context menu
• bug 613588 – Replace livemarks with asynchronous load-on-demand livemarks (was: Livemarks cause synchronous I/O during txul)
• bug 699247 – Remove support for executing on Windows 2000
• bug 693510 – drop support for prefixes from border-radius* and box-shadow
• bug 729133 – preconnect http sessions before cache lookup
• bug 522607 – [css3-background] Accept background-position values like “bottom 10px right 10px”
• bug 548375 – Implement background-repeat as a keyword pair as well as just a single keyword

Firefox Mobile

• Work is ongoing for the off main thread compositing branch (OMTC/Maple)
  • review process for merge into m-c starting in a week (tentative)
• Syncing passwords and open tabs is still progressing

Firefox Sync

• (read the wiki update)

• In Progress:
  • Android Sync
    • Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
  • Sync 2.0 protocol/Persona(BrowserID) auth integration
    • will not be backwards compatible or interoperable

    • representing significant changes on front & back ends

Add-on Builder

• 1.0 launched last Wednesday

• Focus will be on increasing number of third-party libraries on the site

Add-on SDK

Release (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Released 1.5 Last Tuesday!

• Start of Native mobile support: primers here and here!
• Start of l10n support: Docs show you how
• Repacks will be necessary for Firefox 11 compatibility

Stabilization (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to release on 3 April, 2012

Development (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on 3 April, 2012

More Add-ons News:

• AMO Review queue hit ZERO a couple weeks ago!

Identity

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Basically the same as last week:
  • Add: McAfee is causing error messages: Exc in ev handl: [1]
• Top issues: Foxtab broke with Flash and Skipity issues.

Mobile

• SMS permission questions and votes on SUMO; this permission was added by accident and is removed in 11.0b4, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728327

• Issue with Swype adding spaces between letters, maybe related to AUTO SPACING setting in Swype.
• Detailed report on ‘desktop mode’ feature coming to your inbox with user’s expectations compared to other mobile browsers.

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• The French privacy agency announced that Google’s new privacy policy, set to go into force on March 1, would violate European data security law.

• Google announced that it would award up to $1m in bounties for any exploits in Google Chrome during the upcoming Pwn2Own Contest on March 7-9. Bounties will be $60K for exploits within the Chrome browser itself, $40K for those that exploit Chrome and additional software (eg Windows or a plugin) and $20K for those that manage to hack the browser without actually using any vulnerabilities in Chrome.
• Google Chrome and Gmail are now more tightly integrated; users visiting gmail.com with Chrome will now be asked whether they would like to open all email links with Gmail.
• Similarly, Google Spreadsheets now has a keyboard acceleration feature that currently works only with Chrome.
• Google announced that Chrome would support “Do Not Track” by the end of the year.
• A trackpad patent filing strongly indicates that Google is considering entering the desktop market with Android.

WebKit

• Samsung contributed code to support the Vibration API and WebSockets now support compression. The JavascriptCore engine received a triple-tier virtual machine, adding a new low level interpreter which is 2 to 2.5 times as fast as the old one. While performance of the triple-tiering engine is neutral on performance tests, reducing the amount of JIT’ed code delivers strong performance improvements (“double digits“) on real-world websites.

Javascript

• Brendan Eich started a discussion on es-discuss@mozilla.org about full support for 21-bit Unicode.

Opera

• In an curious story, Opera’s App Store company, Handster, decided to submit Opera’s competitor, Dolphin HD, to the Blackberry App Store, without permission. Handster says it was all a misunderstanding.

Security

• The CEO of CrowdStrike, a security firm, announced that his company has found a WebKit vulnerability that allows malware to take full control of Android, Blackberry, and iOS phones running the browser, including controlling the camera and microphone and recording conversations.

WebOS

• The open source WebOS project announced that in March they would add support for the OpenAL Soft audio API, the OpenG and WebGL graphics libraries, GStreamer, a new Linux kernel, LevelDB and a USB debugging toolkit.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Preparing for next merge on 3/13 (Aurora + Beta too).

• 3.6.13 to 10.02 MU offer now available

Mobile

• Currently at MWC demoing latest native UI builds (see also http://paulrouget.com/gaia/ ).

PR

• Telefonica signs up for Mozilla’s mobile Web OS

• Mozilla Boot to Gecko hands-on (video)
  
• Mozilla backs Facebook’s mobile web standards push

• Track Who’s Tracking You With Mozilla Collusion

• TED 2012: New Browser Add-On Visualizes Who Is Tracking You Online

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

• Asa to follow up with Comms on announcing end of win2K support. For consumers, it’s time to upgrade your OS or move to Opera. For managed deployments, the ESR supports win2K for another 10 months or so.

• Kev to follow up with McAfee on error from Desktop Feedback

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-22

« previous week | index | next week »

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

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

• Firefox 10: (Lots of add-on complaints)
  • Real player video downloader doesn’t work [1][2][3]

  • Download youtube video extension bundled Skipity (which is some kind of search/content injecting thing that makes you log into facebook to use) [4][5]
  • Foxtab doesn’t work with the latest flash player update [6][7]
  • And because it’s that time in the release cycle: Lots of searchware:[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]
  • Complaints about 10.4 support (or lack thereof): [28][29][30]
  • Youtube issues: [31][32][33][34]
  • Performance: [35][36][37][38] suggests that it’s bitdefender.
• Firefox 11:
  • Performance seems to be edging worse: [39]

  • Websites: [40](netflix)[41]

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

• The first Tizen Conference has been announced for May 7-9 in San Francisco.

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

• Mozilla to challenge big players in mobile web

• Mozilla gives CAs a chance to come clean about certificate policy violations

• Google, Mozilla Fix Serious Graphics Library Flaw in Chrome, Firefox

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

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-15

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

• ally to coordinate with greg jost on sync uptake metrics, and measuring the impact of the FF10 usability changes
  • See status update below!
• laura to report on the state of persona/personas discussion
• cheng to report back on connection reset issues with SSL
• johnath to wrangle representation in this meeting for identity
  • Emailed and got confirmation that they will start sending representation

  • Added them to the template

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

• 10.0.1 released (unthrottled) last Friday. Release notes here. We did not need a re-spin for 3.6.

• We’ve pushed a prompted major update from 3.6.26 to 10.0.1 as of 2/14
  • Updated billboard with stronger copy and fixed some confusing links.

  • Cut 3.6.X ADUs by 30% since beginning of December, and hoping to cut the remaining ADUs by half in the next few months.

Beta (11)

• Next merge date is 3/13

• Beta 3 will be released Friday 2/17

Aurora (12)

Nightly (13)

• Snappy
  • Killing Firefox start-up inefficiencies on Windows. Check out the details on Brian Bondy’s blog.

  • Most of the cycle collector fixes have landed. Telemetry shows a dramatic reduction in cycle collection times for Firefox 13. Olli and Andrew are investigating the remaining causes of long CC times.
  • Vladan landed a dom storage fix that should reduce the amount of main thread SQL done by content bug 714964.
  • Lots of frontend Telemetry probes are landing (see bug 671038) and already paying off as we caught a tab animation regression in bug 724349.

• • Bug bug 723561 – Create telemetry stopwatch helper to easily store/retrieve timestamp data

Firefox Mobile

• Trunk
  • Waiting for OGL layers to land, ETA next week

  • Good stuff landing in the mean time
    • Start up improved to be faster than Chrome

    • Tab screenshot’ing for thumbnails *much* improved
    • Tab tray openning/closing improved
    • Awesomebar opening improved, especially for large profiles (40s -> 1.6s)
    • Crashes are being killed at an alarming rate (from 115 per 100 ADUs to 5 in 6 weeks)
• Aurora
  • Trucking along with both Native and XUL builds
• Beta
  • Going to ship XUL to the market for all devices until Native is ready for prime time
• Release
  • Going to ship XUL 10 ESR until Native finishes its beta cycle

Other Notes:

• current plan is for Native UI to go out to phones in Firefox 13

• current plan is for Native Tablet UI to go out to tablets in Firefox 14
• This plans are very much in flux, they are here for informational purposes only

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10 Initial Impact
  • Uptick in traffic to sumo, but no down trend in forums
    • Where can I find the code to add a device to Firefox Sync? 3x (from ui)

    • How do I sync Firefox between my desktop and mobile device? 1.5x (from ui)
    • Increases in ‘What’s Firefox Sync?’ & ‘How do I manage my Firefox Sync’
  • Metrics is looking into more quantitative numbers. No ETA yet
• Organizational Changes/Announcements
  • Sync’s Dev Ops and Developers have been combined into one team

  • Sync’s UX/UI is now owned by Madhava, all other services UX is owned by Bryan Clark. Congrats to both of them
• The next Sync Rapid Release meeting is coming up.
  • If there is something you would like the sync team to work on or a new idea to consider, pitch it there

  • 2pm pst, Feb 28th, vidyo room ‘services’ please email ally if you would like to be added to the zimbra invite.
• BrowserID+Sync Authentication
  • Warning: The two sync systems will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
• Native Sync
  • Please file bugs. Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug

  • We have daily bug triage at 4pm, #androidsync
  • Old news that bears repeating:
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
      • Though some of our contributors may change that!
• Upcoming Releases
  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11 (aka Beta): Addon Sync

  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora (but not Beta)

Add-on Builder

• 1.0 release has been rescheduled for next Wednesday

• Work week for Builder team is next week

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Looking good since last week’s hotfix

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Spun 1.5RC2 yesterday

• Still on track to release next week, Feb 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Current thinking is that bug 696533 might get us more mobile features faster – can’t tell timeframe so not adding to docs yet.

• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Bay Area Firefox Add-ons meetup Tuesday, February 21 6:00PM PST at the Mozilla SF Offices RSVP Here – join us!

Identity

• Sign into the browser feature page

• Gone through a couple of rounds of wireframes, progressing nicely (not on the feature page, will get them there soon)

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Firefox 10.0.1:
  • Looks like we fixed the cursor thing by fixing Java :)

  • Performance :(
  • AVG seems fixed, Norton is getting better
  • Youtube issues [1][2][3]
  • Problem with German update?: [4]
  • Report from this weekend:
    • looks like you may have a problem installing Firefox if your admin account isn’t Administrator. [5] [6] bug 726542

    • windows 7 taskbar icon duplication (we seem to see this with all updates) [7]
    • A bunch of comments about fonts being too small (sort of started since 8/9 but has been increasing): [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
    • Radio stations not working?: [13] [14] [15] [16]
      • There are also reports of audio not working in general: [17] [18]
    • Performance problems/hangs/slowness: [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] (hang on PDFs)
    • Mac perf problems: [35] [36] [37]
    • Connectivity problems: [38] [39] (latter caused by ATT “acceleration”)
    • Way too many add-on compatibility checks: [40] [41] [42] bug 726543
    • Crashes/failed startup: [43] [44] (startup) [45] (startup) [46] [47] (PDF printing) [48] (PDFs) [49] (soon after startup) [50] (startup)

Mobile

• No new feedback updates this week, some anecdotal feedback from 10 provided to UX

• Working on NativeUI documentation
• Testing Aurora and Nightly and Sync set up
• SUMO day tomorrow, to support 10.0.1

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• The Chromium team expanded the Chromium Security Rewards Program, by increasing its scope to cover the Chromium OS.

• The new Chrome Beta release enables GPU-accelerated rendering of 2D canvas content, and also enables WebGL acceleration for people with older GPUs using Swiftshader, a software rasterizer that Google licensed from TransGaming. This should make for significant performance improvements on systems like Windows XP.
• Chrome’s dev channel features an updated V8 Javascript engine that offers initial support for lexical scoping, collections, weak maps, and proxies.
• Google also released a Field Guide to Web Applications that offer a high-level, architectural overview of how to design web applications. Their HTML5Rocks site was updated, and features an excellent detailed overview of the architecture of the Chrome and Mozilla browsers.
• Chrome 17 stable was released. 20 security bugs were fixed — 1 critical, 8 high, 5 medium, and 6 low. A significant number were detected with AddressSanitizer, a fast memory error detector.
• Chrome’s Dev Channel release has a few interesting new features, including using Google’s servers to conduct spellchecking for entered and pasted text.
• The Sencha team conducted an initial review of Google Chrome for Android, giving it high marks. It notes that SunSpider performance is little different than other browsers and suggests that it is now time to shelve that particular benchmark test.

Opera

• The latest snapshot of Opera 12 offers support for Do Not Track and a substantial number of SSL performance optimizations.

Microsoft

• Microsoft released a Critical update for MSIE 6, 7, 8, and 9. The vulnerability would allow remote code execution from a specially constructed web page. The update itself had to be updated shortly afterwards after it incorrectly reported that google.com was infected with the Blackhole Exploitation Kit.

• MSIE 10 will allow full support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for XMLHttpRequests.
• In a 9,000 word blog post, Microsoft’s Windows president Steven Sinofsky divulged a slew of details on Windows on ARM. Microsoft plans to have ARM PCs available when other Windows 8 computers are available, and the company will also include desktop versions of optimized Office 15 applications. Windows 8 ARM PCs will also never turn off, instead going into a standby mode that should last for weeks.

WebOS

• HP released the source code to Isis, the WebOS browser, which apparently offers “unrivaled speed and standards compliance”.

W3C

• Webmonkey has a good summary article describing the issues and positions in the debate as to whether other browsers should support -webkit-prefixed CSS properties. (Also, Tantek’s interview at A List Apart.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• The acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google was approved in the US and the EU

• Google plans to test a “next generation personal communication device”

• The Android Market was enhanced with automatic malware scanning for apps

• Android captured 51% of smartphone sales in 2011, iOS 24% and Symbian 12%

• Smartphones represent only 12% of total global handsets in use today, but over 82% of total global handset traffic

• First Intel Medfield-based Motorola handset rumoured to be announced at MWC

• Skyfire raised almost $8 million in a round of funding which was in part sponsored by Verizon

• More details on Windows Phone 8 revealed

• Opera partnered with India’s third largest carrier

• Dolphin browser 3.5 was released on iOS

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• New 3.6 Upgrade Billboards went live yesterday (thanks Pascal and L10n!)
  • As discussed above, strengthened copy and upgrade experience, Cut ADUs by 30% since December.
• Working on website collateral for next releases
• Display ads continuing for another few weeks
• Starting the blog process for next Aurora and Beta

Mobile

• MWC demo scripts revisions

• Finding agency for FF11 launch programs

Press

• Firefox in 2012: What’s in Store for the Open-Source Browser?

• Mozilla throws ‘freedom’ at Microsoft, Google, Apple tanks
• Mozilla promises social, privacy-driven Firefox in 2012
• Mozilla’s plan for 2012: Break the ecosystem lock
  
• Don’t Worry, You Won’t Be Stuck Using Internet Explorer On Windows 8

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

• cheng to dig into connection reset issues with SSL

• irina to let us know whether dolphin for iOS uses Sync

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

• Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

• We plan to ship 10.0.1 (both mainline and ESR) with the following changeset this Friday (2/10): 18ce5e304e97

Beta (11)

• Barring unexpected issues, Firefox 11 Beta 2 will ship this Friday (2/10)

Aurora (12)

• Aurora 12 desktop was out to testers as of 2/3

• Aurora 12 mobile was out to testers as of 2/7

Nightly (13)

• Safebrowsing move from SQLite to flat file landed (bug 673470)

• Telemetry dashboard is now public! See Taras’ presentation for access details.

• If you’re seeing long hangs on Aurora 12 or Nightly 13, please comment in bug 725110

• Safe Mode: Auto detect previous start-up failure and offer to start in safe mode bug 294260

• [New Tab Page] Set to enabled by default on Nightly bug 716538

Firefox Mobile

• No mobile beta this week
  • We are holding for performance issues

  • Schedule is being reworked
• Hi, Chrome on Android
  • We will be adding Chrome to our competitive testing

  • Solid beta, but not intimidating

Firefox Sync

• Sync now has a Product Marketing Manager. Welcome to Greg Jost!

• Native Sync
  • did not go to Beta, along with native fennec

  • Please file bugs. Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
  • We have daily bug triage at 4pm
  • You can find us on irc, #androidsync
  • Old news that bears repeating
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

    • Migration from XUL to Native may cause your sync account to disappear
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
• Work has started on integrating BrowserID into Sync authentication
  • The two sync systems will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
• Coming to a release near you
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing

  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11 (aka Beta): Addon Sync
  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora (but not Beta)

Add-on Builder

• release today

• shooting new tutorial today
• all systems are still GO for launch next Wednesday February 15th

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Found a nasty and released 1.4.3
  • Important for developers using simple-prefs, simple-storage, or passwords APIs to take a look at:

  • Blog post explaining issue and fix
  • We wrote a module to help anyone affected “recover”

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Spun 1.5RC1 yesterday

• Get started writing add-ons for Adnroid!
• Still on track to release Feb 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Add-on of the week!

• Andrew Sutherland has written an SDK-based add-on called about:nosy to show “about:memory with charts, helps you lay blame more easily”

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 10:

• AVG killing the enter button in the address bar. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]

• RealPlayer Video Downloader doesn’t work [12][13][14]
• Norton isn’t compatible [15][16][17][18][19]
• Can’t highlight/select text areas/missing cursor: [20][21][22][23][24][25]
• Startup crashes [26][27]
• General crashiness: [28][29][30]
• We changed arrow keys to scroll 3 lines rather than 1: [31][32]
• Extensions hidden/lost: [33]
• Some HTTPs connections turning into connection reset: [34][35] — looks related to non-standard ports (used by internal services/routers)

Mobile

• FF10 Android market feedback is consistent with previous XUL releases (performance and flash are top issues). NativeUI will fix both of these problems.

SUMO Days update:

• We started SUMO Days on Nov 3rd and we answered 58% of the questions asked that first day.

• We’ve been working to grow the contributors to our support forum and improve the SUMO web content every two weeks since.
• Last week, we answered 81% of the questions asked and we’ve made a big improvement in the overall average of questions answered. So, huge congrats to the SUMO contributors for their hard work to optimize the site content and get us on a path to answering every user question every day.

UX & User Research

Research

• The Mobile Diary project is now in the hands of our users. The project will help us learn more about user attitudes, behaviors, and use cases. If you want to get an in-depth look at user needs, consider attending a participant interview, scheduled in the SF Bay area on Feb 15-16, 18-19, and 21st. Get in touch with Mary Trombley if you’re interested.

Design

• Australis project:
  • Tab Strip Visual Redesign

  • Features/Desktop/Panel Menu
  • Toolbar Customization
  • Arrow Panel Redesign
• Translation designs in progress
• Metro UI (Win design in progress
• URL Autocomplete landed! Then disabled! Then hopefully enabled again! (might change to only complete for previously typed entries)
• New download manager still awaiting landing
• New tab refinements continuing, enabled by default, give us feedback!
• Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• Google released a beta of Chrome for Android, based on a fork of the Chromium code (version 16.0.915.75). A major focus for the development team is to re-merge the trees; some of the work has been done. Because of the Java base of Android, a lot of work using Java Native Interfaces will have to be done, no doubt to improve device support.

• Chrome for Android also has integrated support for a mobile remote debugger, allowing developers to debug or profile their mobile web pages and web apps using a desktop machine. Here’s a screencast demo. Developers are encouraged to ask questions on stackoverflow.com.

• Google announced that Chrome would soon stop conducting SSL online revocation checks, using its existing software processes to distribute lists of revoked certificates.

• The German government, in a general list of recommendations for computer security, recommended the Google Chrome browser, primarily because of its sandbox architecture.

• Development versions of Chrome now feature a new Settings UI that is fluid and appears to make use of graphic acceleration; see the video at the link for a demo.

• The Dev version also now has partial support for Web Intents — here’s a screenshot.

Microsoft

• The Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be released on February 29 at Mobile World Congress.

• The IE team’s blog posted a detailed summary of the upcoming support of CSS3 3D transforms, with some interesting demos.

• In a related post, the team drew attention to the fact that IE10 embedded in Metro apps will have the same performance, unlike similar apps on iOS, which run more than three times as slow.

• MSIE 10 will offer compressed proxy browsing.

Opera

• The W3C blog posted an interview with two members of the Opera team. They said among other things that Opera Mini’s proxy browsing / compression features make it so popular with users in developing regions that carriers use it in their advertising. There’s also an interesting summary of their vision for HTML5 on television sets.

Other

• RIM has announced that all the code in their SDK for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform will be open sourced. Code is available at http://blackberry.github.com and development of the HTML5 SDK is happening in the open there.

• There’s a proposal at the W3C for the next version of HTML to support accessing image metadata in the DOM.

• Strangeloop Networks released a “State of the Internet” report that indicates that while the average site is 10% faster than it was a year ago, top-ranked sites are getting bigger and slower, with the average home page containing 98 objects.

Mobile

This week we are talking about Chrome for Android beta. Summary below, detailed report in your inbox.

• Yesterday Google launched Chrome for Android beta, as a first step towards making Chrome the standard browser for Android version 4 and above. The release supports Ice Cream Sandwich, ARMv7-based devices, which currently make 1% of the Android install base and account for a 3 million addressable base.

• The browser is based on Chrome v16 and V8 v3.8 and has a multi-process architecture similar to the desktop version. It does not have plug-in support, and lack of Flash in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market. An Android Central poll asking “Is a lack of Flash support on the mobile browser a deal-breaker?” has 47% of Yes answers and 52% of No.

• Its UA String is: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-US; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) CrMo/16.0.912.75 Mobile Safari/535.7)

• Speed, simplicity and personal are its main user propositions, while tab management, user data sync, the Omnibox and its multi-process architecture are the main promoted features. For developers, Chrome comes with a remote debugging via USB feature and boasts Web standards compliance, extensive HTML5 support and hardware acceleration.

• Its positioning speaks to speed, personalization and extension of the desktop. Branding is persistent in the product on the New Tab page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the desktop: friendly, light, easy-going, simple and straight to the point. Tagline is “Your Chrome, away from home.”

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Finishing 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads this week.

• Finalizing plans for next Firefox release.
• Finishing Up devices page and reworking content silos on mozilla.org/firefox and mozilla properties.

Mobile

• Re-visiting positioning and marketing plan for Firefox for Android

• Preparing for MWC
• Video for Firefox 11 launch

Press

• Mozilla’s Firefox 10 Muscles Up on Developer Tools

• Firefox 11 enters beta, brings add-on sync

• As Firefox 11 Hits Beta, Work Begins on Push Notifications for the Web

• Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox

• Coming to Firefox: Flash Player in a sandbox

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Do we have a plan for shipping Firefox 11 on patch Tuesday? If not, when/where will that be figured out? (bhearsum)
  • We will go manual only until we are comfortable unthrottling (late in the week of 3/11, or early in the week of 3/18)
• Update on feedback: HTTPs problem seems to be “connection reset” errors when connecting to servers on non-standard ports (may be self-signed cert specific)
• When should Push/BiPostal/Notifications appear as a product here? [ally]

Actions this week

• ally to coordinate with greg jost on sync uptake metrics, and measuring the impact of the FF10 usability changes

• laura to report on the state of persona/personas discussion
• cheng to report back on connection reset issues with SSL
• johnath to wrangle representation in this meeting for identity

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-01

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

• Lawrence will follow up about add-ons default to compatible on mobile (Dec. 14)
  • Add-ons will default to compatible on mobile in Firefox 12 bug 719921

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

• The 1/31 merge for 11->Beta and 12->Aurora is now complete

Release (3.6, 10)

• Firefox 10, Firefox 3.6.26, and ESR 10 all shipped yesterday (1/31)
  • See the release notes here

Beta (11)

• Going to build with FF11 beta 1 today

Aurora (12)

• Silent update – Windows UAC service in now on Aurora – few patches left to land to complete this work

Nightly (13)

• Snappy – CC and GC fixes going in this week. More on what’s happening in Snappy on Taras’ blog

• bug 455553 “New Tab Page feature” landed
• bug 90268 “move plugins to content – plugins should withstand a reframe of the object frame” is fixed.
• bug 563318 “switch trunk builds to use Visual C++ 2010″ has happened

Telemetry proposal

• Opt-in rate has been low on Telemetry

• Want to collect more data earlier in the dev cycle
• Proposal to make Telemetry opt-out on Nightly and Aurora channels
  • Users will be prompted on first launch in the browser (existing users on first launch after opt-out starts) via a door hangar to inform that Mozilla is collecting data and to provide a link to more information including how to opt-out on these channels

  • about: dialogs will be updated to include a statement about data collection as well
• Telemetry will continue to be opt-in on Release and Beta
• Concerns can be added to bug 699806 or posted to dev.planning

Firefox Mobile

• ICS plugin support landed on trunk last night, it is awesome

• UA string changed
  • We are actively filing evangelism bugs now

  • File bugs in | Fennec Native / Evangelism |
• Native code and builds moved to Beta, but we are not “ready to ship”
  • Expect uplift from Aurora to Beta
• Start UX has improved and will continue to improve
• UI responsiveness has improved and will continue to improve
• AMO has added support for Native Fennec add-ons \o/

Firefox Sync

• has nothing new to report (as mobile will probably steal our thunder anyway :) )

• old news that bears repeating
  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

    • It may consume excess battery
    • Migration from XUL to Native will likely cause your sync account to disappear
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• Release today

• v1.0 release remains on-track for February 15th
• Working with marketing on various v1.0 launch plans

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Made two hotfix releases last week(1.4.1 & 1.4.2). Both related to pushing 1.4 into Builder
  • Post-mortem tomorrow to figure out if we could have avoided either of these hotfixes.

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Released 1.5b3 yesterday

• Still on track to release on Feb. 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Still on track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Firefox 9:
  • Fast Video Downloader updated and broke 3.6 users: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/915355 (Jorge has disabled it for 3.6)

• Firefox 10:
  • Norton doesn’t work (supposedly it has an update but we’re still seeing input around Norton)

  • AVG breaks the address bar (can’t press enter, must click GO): [1] [2]
  • Some comments around hidden/vanishing extensions. : [3] [4]
  • Possibly issues uploading maybe this oneor this one

Mobile

• Sprinting for FF11 doc updates to support NativeUI

• Firefox for Android meetup in SF is tonight!
• SUMO day is tomorrow

UX & User Research

• Australis project has feature pages, is getting staffed:
  • Tab_Strip_Visual_Redesign

  • Features/Desktop/Panel_Menu
  • Toolbar_Customization
  • Arrow_Panel_Redesign
• Basic research on Translation feature done, designs coming soon
• Metro UI (Win design work in progress
• URL Autocomplete landed!
• New download manager about to land (and/or has landed), still some known issues
• New tab refinements continuing, landed on Nightly (preffed off)
• Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Opera

• Recent updates in the Dragonfly developer tool include better filtering in the Network Inspector, including both flow and table views of network requests, as well as some minor improvements to the Style Inspector.

• Opera also made some improvements in their address bar. It now weights the last visit, keyword positions, and number of matches when prioritizing possibilities.

Microsoft

• Perhaps due to their close proximity in the Seattle area, Amazon and Microsoft seem to have good relations. Notably, Amazon just released an SDK for their web services for the Windows Phone platform.

• Since the Windows 8 “Metro-style” version of MSIE will not support plugins, Microsoft posted some information about how websites can signal that their website will only work in the legacy/desktop mode by sending a specific HTTP header or meta tag.

• Microsoft also released IDBExplorer, a debugging tool for IndexedDB applications. It provides a tree view of DBs.

Google

• The Product Manager responsible for the Chromebook confirmed that while Google plans to continue to streamline its product offerings, the Chromebook is seen as a long-term play and will continue to receive investment for the foreseeable future.

• The Chromium team released the Javascript to Dart Synonym app, which allows Javascript developers to easily understand how to “translate” their Javascript applications into Dart.

• Google also released more information, targeted at users, about how the newly-improved Safe Browsing feature works. It “now analyses properties of each page you visit to determine the likelihood of it being a phishing page.” When the likelihood is higher than a certain level, it sends the URL to Google for further analysis.

• The dev version of Google Chrome now partially exposes users’ privacy preferences to extension developers.

• As discussed some weeks ago, Chrome now supports Google’s proposed “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields; it allows web developers to unambiguously identify fields as “name”, “street-address”, etc.

Webkit

• Interesting presentation: At a recent Javascript conference, Matt Seeley, a senior Netflix developer described how they work with an embedded version of Webkit in their product, which is now available in more than 450 low and high-end devices in more than 40 countries.

• Other recent additions to the WeKit codebase include an extension API providing information about screen brightness, and a debug page for Omnibox. The WebKit team is also building a performance test reporting system, using Mozilla’s graph server.

HTML5/ Video

• LongTail Video released their State of HTML5 Video report, showing that across both desktop and mobile, more than 2/3 of browsers support HTML5, with the remainder largely made up of MSIE 6,7, and 8. The report also summarizes the current level of support for various video tag attributes. Currently only Google Chrome and Opera support all of them. Other areas summarized include accessibility, adaptive playback and fullscreen support.

• A group of HTML5 evangelists have put together html5please.us, which summarizes the information behind sites like http://caniuse.com to present clear, actionable recommendations on which HTML5 features should be used or avoided, based on the breadth and depth of support across all browsers.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Android tablet sales reached 10.5 million units in Q4 of 2011 and accounted for 39% of global tablet market

• 5 – 6 million Kindle Fire tablets were sold in Q4 2011, but not generating profits for Amazon

• Apple might have become the top smartphone producer in Q4 2011, in close competition with Samsung

• The European Commission opened a formal investigation into Samsung’s use of its rights to essential 3G wireless patents

• ARM had very good results in Q4 2011, but facing increased competition from Intel

• Open WebOS 1.0 to be released in September

• Nokia celebrated the sale of the 1.5 billionth Series 40 phone

• A bill concerning the installation of monitoring software on mobile phones by carriers and OEMs has been proposed in the US

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Continuing to localize improved 3.6 upgrade billboards

• Working on marketing plans for next Firefox
• Putting collateral together for Aurora and Beta later this week.

Mobile

• Beta Snippets

• Beta FB ads
• Updating collateral on Beta pages

Press

• Firefox simplifies add-on updates; no native Android interface–yet

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

• Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-25

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 9)

• 3.6.26 to be released to the beta population tomorrow, subsequently released next Tuesday

Beta (10)

• Pushing our final beta out tomorrow, and plan to release on Tuesday

• Add-ons default to compatible is in Firefox 10. Add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4+ will be compatible in Firefox 10.
• Add-on hotfix testing is in Firefox 10 and testing is going well with our beta audience – once the metrics team helps verify our understanding of the data we’ve gotten back, we can greenlight the use of a hotfix in the place of some chemspills

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

• bug 566489: inline autocomplete has landed thanks to efforts from David Dahl and Marco Bonardo. Marco has been fixing followups in an attempt to polish the feature for release, but we may end up disabling it on Aurora to get some extra bake time.

• Snappy (last week’s summary)
  • Smooth scrolling has landed (bug 198964)

Firefox Mobile

• Working toward Beta

• Current status blog post

• Nightly

• Aurora
  • not to steal sync’s thunder, but we expect sync to be uplifted by the end of the week

  • several non-sync patches are dependent on sync landing, so will get unblocked by that
• Beta
  • when 11 goes to beta, we’ll be doing a split release
    • incompatibility needs to be built into the manifests

    • manifests patches are based on branding, should land soon
    • RelEng and QA are conducting testing with a dummy market product to validate all these moving pieces
• Release

Firefox Sync

• Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly
  • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

  • Migration from XUL to Native will likely cause your sync account to disappear
    • mobile is investigating a fix
  • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
• The sync team is planning to migrate our code base to MPL v2.0
  • Please holler if there is any reason we should not.
• old news that bears repeating
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• Release today

• Next week we begin intensive QA rounds in preparation for release
• Marketing/PR is assigning someone to handle our 1.0 launch
• 1st Web Builder code check-in happened this week, hoping to have a working prototype in ~5 weeks

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• 1.4 Released two weeks ago – no issues

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• 1.5b2 Released yesterday

• On track to release on Feb. 21st, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Have made good progress on Talos testing – jhammel blogged about it

• Still having discussion of localizing html elements in SDK-based addons – please join in
• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21st, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Follow up from last week:
  • [1] Slowness in 10 peaked (although not much of one) around the 8th and has been falling (a little) since.

Firefox 9.0.1

• Nothing major new.

• Some complaints around 3.6 > 9 major update (where is reload button, confusion around session restore, extensions)

Mobile

UX & User Research

Research: The Mobile Diary Project is progressing nicely. We are in the process of recruiting participants to tell us how they use apps and how they use the browser. There will be opportunities for you to meet with these mobile users coming up in mid-February. Email Mary Trombley if you have questions.

Design

• New ux-review@mozilla.com UI review queue is being beat into submission on a daily basis
  • We reduced the number of uiwanted’s from 420 to 316 (104 bugs processed) last week, racing towards zero!
• Metro UI design work is starting, and we know what we can (and can’t) do wrt. WinRT and Win32 APIs
• Trond & Josh hard at work for Gaia (B2G) UI for Mobile World Congress
• Sync “papercut” fixes are in progress (Yuan and Jinghua)
• Designs on BrowserID, log in to the browser + next-generation sync approach is starting this week (Zhenshuo)
• zpao landed Lion fullscreen mode on the UX branch, is epic
• New tab page has visual improvements (Boriss & ttaubert)
• Design work on translation of content in-browser is starting this week too (Yuan)

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Microsoft

• There continue to be persistent rumours that Microsoft is planning to have a unified platform from the OS kernel up for Windows 8, “not just in terms of a common design language and interface (Metro), the same HTML5 Internet Explorer browser and integration with Windows Live and Azure — but also in terms of a common core.”

• Other rumours indicate that the next release of Windows 8 will be called a consumer preview, not “beta”. Interviews with developers who have recently built apps on the current Developer Preview said, overall, that it is still rough, with plenty of missing functionality, but that they found it possible to build the apps they wanted.

• Microsoft also released an updated version of Compat Inspector that works with the IE10 Preview. This tool allows webmasters to identify changes that are required to better serve IE9 and IE10.

Google

• An interesting blog post details a claim that the primary reason Google decided to create the Chrome browser was to perfect technologies required to better crawl the web, all in an effort to improve search rankings. By citing patent applications, the author makes the claim that “GoogleBot is a browser”.

• Google released some advertising videos promoting the automatic translation capabilities of Chrome.

• Recent WebKit / Chrome developments include a screen-size emulation back-end in the Web Inspector tool, which will soon allow for easy emulation of mobile device screens, and the first commits to support the Shadow DOM in Javascript.

• Web RTC is now in Google Chrome’s dev channel.

• Google also awarded $6133.70 in rewards to teams reporting four security bugs in Chrome; all four are fixed in the latest stable version of the browser.

Opera

• Opera’s Dragonfly editing tool now features dynamic Javascript value inspection — hitting shift while clicking on an element will show its value in a tooltip.

Other

• At an upcoming security conference in Vancouver, separate teams of hackers will be competing to win $60,000 to take advantage of recently-patched vulnerabilities in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

• An interesting interview on the W3C blog with the head of the Financial Times’ web team on why they decided to abandon their iOS native client application and develop an HTML5 version instead. They describe some of the functionality they miss (notifications) and the workarounds they had to develop to handle additional caching and swiping functionality.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Dolphin HD will come preloaded with add-ons, reveals new beta release

• Sony Ericsson joins HTC and Motorola with low Q4 2011 results, but will revamp strategy as it becomes Sony

• HTC to integrate IBM business solutions on devices in effort to consolidate on the enterprise market

• Apple on path to 20% smartphone sales marketshare for 2011 after record Q4 2011 results

• Quad-core 1.5 GHz devices on their way, by Samsung

• Mobile payments rushing towards mainstream availability in the US and Europe

• RIM has a new CEO, no strategic changes are planned

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Every moment counts in Mozilla’s bid for mobile relevance

• Mozilla releases Rust 0.1, the language that will eventually usurp Firefox’s C++

• Mozilla ‘crowdsourcing’ State of the Union address

• Mozilla’s Anti-SOPA Message Reached 40 Million People

Desktop

• 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads in progress, working on updating copy on Major Update billboard to improve CTRs.

• Readying materials for the releases next week (Aurora, Beta, GA).
• Working on a devices landing page experiment for Mozilla.org/Firefox
• Marketing plan for next release.

Mobile

• Tablet media buy campaign ends this week (SEM efforts still live)

• Facebook ads for tablets ended yesterday
• MWC content and messaging
• Marketing plan for FF11
• Blog post for FF11 Beta
• Optimizing acquisition funnel for Aurora and Beta

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Will johnath close this meeting with an interpretive dance?

• [Michael Verdi] Maybe a better solution to recording the meeting is for the meeting owner to use the internal Vidyo recording capability and then make it it available.

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-18

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 9)

Beta (10)

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

Find in Page works a lot better bug 171237
Smooth scrolling is on by default bug 198963
Window frame size on Windows fixed bug 618353

Firefox Mobile

• Nightly
  • Sync is in!
• Aurora
  • working on a process to uplift from nightly to aurora

Firefox Sync

• services team is offsite 2012-01-18 & 2012-01-19

• Firefox Sync likely to be is enabled in Native Fennec soon.
  • History and bookmarks sync, tabs and passwords are TBD (will drop tabs if have to)
• The Sync Rapid Release Meeting was 2012-01-17
  • covered what has landed in Firefox 10, 11, 12, 13+, serverside, and internal improvements\
    • does not cover explicit list of fennec sync bugs or issues.
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Meetings/RapidRelease/2012-01-17
• old news that bears repeating
  • Addons being sync’ed in firefox 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• The 1.0 Add-on Builder release date has been finalized, we’ll be launching the site on February 15th.

• There will be 1-2 more polish/hardening pushes before that date, with the final two weeks dedicated to extensive QA.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Released 1.4 last Tuesday, so far, so good.

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• should spin up 1.5b1 today or tomorrow

• beginnings of mobile work will be in 1.5
  • blog post soon about where we are starting with mobile
• 1.5 release on track for Feb. 20, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to merge to stabilization Feb 20, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 9

• Top issue: Yahoo messenger from Yahoo mail bug 713014

• Mac Netflix broken in 9 (fixed in 10) for 64-bit Firefox. bug 715396
• Possibly an issue with Ask toolbar breaking Flash (a couple people say using malware sweeper is needed to get rid of ask completely)
• Possibly an issue with plugin container getting stuck with 100% CPU

Firefox 10:

• A number of comments about speed/performance (a couple comments about shorter battery life)

• suomi24.fi (finnish email provider) compatibility
• Youtube problems (some people say crash, some say it hangs/stutters)

Mobile

• Updating all Firefox Mobile documentation for version 11

• SUMO Day is tomorrow (come on over and answer 10 questions if you dare)
• Two weeks from tonight, celebrate the NativeUI in SF

UX & User Research

• Starting Metro (Windows UI effort this week.

• Working with 4 students from MSU to move preferences in-content.
• Papercuts cleanup for Sync in preparation for MWC still ongoing.
• Q1 goals have been finalized, and will be posted shortly.

Market Insights

Desktop / Web Platform

Tizen

As the first Tizen SDK is examined more closely, some analysts are noting that it does not use the Wayland display server, as some had expected. There has also been a nine-minute video posted of a Tizen session inside the SDK’s emulator.

Sencha

Sencha announced that the latest version of its Animator tool now supports Firefox versions 7+.

Google

Google unveiled the Chromebox at the CES show in Las Vegas last week, a desktop version of the Chromebook. It is expected to use the new HTML5-based “window manager” called Aura, that provides a closer desktop experience. See the short demo video of Aura here.

Google Gmail released an updated version of their HTML5 web client, only available in the Google Chrome Web Store, that supports offline management of mail up to 31 days old.

Google Chrome

The Google Chrome security team made a formal post describing the core principles with which they approach security, signalling perhaps an increased focus on security in communications from the project.

The Chromium team is making an effort to ensure all tests in the MSIE Testcenter pass, marking their progress in this Google Docs spreadsheet.

W3C

The W3C has issued a call for comments for a Speech API

Gnome Epiphany

The GNOME project released GNOME 3.0, along with Epiphany 3.0, the default browser. It features WebkitGTK+ 1.4.0 and a number of UI refinements, including a completely reworked download UI.

WebKit

A “source” column has been added to the CSS Profiler, allowing web developers to exactly which line of which CSS file is responsible for performance issues. Two new CSS properties, font-kerning and font-variant-ligatures, were enabled. A patch from a web developer working for the Baidu search engine in China was also received.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Motorola and Intel entered a multiyear partnership to produce Intel-based Android devices

• CyanogenMod picking up among early-adopters, with the support of OEMs

• Samsung announced the intention to merge Bada and Tizen. no decision yet

• Nokia to reach a 11% smarthphone shipments marketshare in 2012, down to 8% in 2013

• Web-enabled feature phones picking up interest from phone vendors

• In 2010 an estimated 28% of all mobile handsets were smartphones in Western Europe, with an expected 37% in 2012 and 49% in 2015, reveals the European Mobile Observatory

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• 3.6 Update Display ad campaign currently live in English, with more locales coming soon.

• Working on next Firefox update, including Firefox ESR, currently expected on Jan 31st.
• Firefox Aurora online display ads campaign.
• Ongoing – Firefox Aurora ads in Facebook
• Firefox Aurora SEM campaign going live this week.
• Firefox Aurora available in Affiliates Program
• Firefox Beta communications and messaging

Mobile

• Facebook ads for tablets (ja doing the best at 0.09% CTR, de/fr/singapore/us)

• Online media buy campaign for tablets ends this week – 82,000+ clicks delivered so far, analysis will be sent out after campaign ends
• SEM campaign launch for tablets pending
• Kicking off SEO efforts to streamline acquisition funnel
• Finalizing marketing plan proposal for FF11 launch
• native Fennec Beta communications and messaging
• Preparing for MWC

Public Relations

Google, Mozilla, Wikipedia Fight SOPA Piracy Bill

Mozilla, Firefox join anti-SOPA strike

Black Duck Software Names 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year

Has Firefox Lost Its Edge?

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Nobody voiced a concern over the last week about recording this meeting.

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-11

« previous week | index | next week »

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

Actions from Last Week

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 9)

• 3.6.26 security triage starting tomorrow

• Full unthrottling of FF9 to occur once we have a better understanding of bug 715396
• 3.6.25->9.0.1 advertised update planned for next week, will be announced once we’re fully unthrottled on FF9

Beta (10)

• Code freeze for FF10 is 2012-01-20

• Go to build for FF10 release candidate will be 2012-01-23
  • A decision about whether or not to ship add-ons compatible by default (and with what prefs set) will be made this same day
• Final sign-off for FF10 will be 2012-01-25
• Next source migration is 2012-01-31

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

Firefox Mobile

• Many patches are currently landing on Aurora
  • Drivers are doing a great job with granting/denying approvals in a timely manner
• Mobile is using tracking-fennec:11+ to track bugs that need to be considered for Firefox11 (native)
• User-agent discussion is happening in dev.planning

Firefox Sync

• BrowserID+sync project in the design phase
  • No longer targeting mobile world congress, or the fennec launch

  • What it means for user privacy, security, other projects still being worked out
• UI changes in 10 not deemed sufficient, a papercuts project is in design phase
  • So further changes will be made in 12+, the changes in 10 will remain unchanged (improvement, but still not good enough)
• 2012 roadmap is TBA
  • So if there’s something your team really wants from Sync, let us know
• Old News that bears repeating:
  • the big feature for firefox 10 is the UI overhaul

  • the big feature for firefox 11 is the Addon Sync engine
  • Native Sync is still in progress, it is not enabled in native fennec yet
    • Nota Bene: because of the intents methodology of android, more than one native sync/fennec install produces undefined sync behavior

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Released 1.4 (aka the Myk Melez Release) yesterday!
  • New Simple Prefs module comes courtesy of community members Hernan Colmeiro and Erik Vold

  • Brand new loader – new simplified XPI file structure
  • Loads of changes – please read the release notes!

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Merge from development branch happened yesterday

• All code switched to MPL 2!
• On track to release 1.5 February 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Jeff Hammel is going to help us get Talos testing up – expect that soon

• On track to merge to Stabilization February 21, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• New 9.0 issues:
  • [1] Netflix doesn’t work. Looks to be only 10.6 mac; may have to do with recent silverlight update.

  • tabbrowser.xml not responding [2] and [3] also happened in 8: [4]
  • Flash not working: [5] (may have to do with 64-bit flash?)
  • Lots of norton toolbar compatibility questions [6][7]
  • URL not valid complaints: [8][9]
  • Possibly more Java breakage: [10][11]
  • Some complaints that networks are slower with 9: [12][13]

• Existing known 9.0 issues:
  • Yahoo web-based IM

  • Bookmark icons

• Extended Support Release (ESR) was announced on the Mozilla Blog. First release should be Firefox 10, and final implementation details are being worked on with RelEng (bug 717106). Questions and/or comments are welcomed by kev (kev at mozilladotcom or kev on IRC)

Mobile

• Android market feedback on v9 continues to confirm that the NativeUI work to improve performance, stability, and add flash support will address a majority of 1 & 2 star reviews.

• SUMO questions about Firefox Mobile are up ~20% in the last couple of weeks, with a handful of Aurora questions starting to appear, mostly about features that are still being re-implemented in the new UI (find in page and sync).
• Input feedback for 9 and 10 beta is positive overall, with Flash support continuing to be a top issue.

UX & User Research

• Yuan is working with Jinghua to address papercuts in the Sync setup process before MWC.

• Draft of Q1 2012 goals have been posted to the main intranet goals page, will be finalized later this week
• Trond is in SF to work on Gaia (B2G) in the time leading up to MWC, say hi!

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Tizen

The Tizen initiative made an alpha release of the source code for the Tizen operating system, along with fairly detailed documentation of the Web API layer. Intel has now also officially joined as a member of the industry consortium.

In related news, Nokia purchased feature phone OS vendor Smarterphone this week.

Sencha

Sencha made an interesting blog post about their 2012 wishes for HTML5. They ranged from better support for media devices, improved audio support, better caching, a contacts API. Their number one wish was for a better mobile browser debugger.

Microsoft

It’s still not clear whether or not Microsoft is going to support “legacy” Desktop apps on ARM-based hardware (i.e. tablets). There are conflicting screenshots from demos and Microsoft has not yet made an official announcement on the matter.

Microsoft also made a detailed blog post about the upcoming support for additional OpenType features in CSS: options such as kerning, superscript and subscript, ornamental swashes, etc. Firefox had previously been the sole browser to support this since version 4.

Opera

Opera launched the Opera TV Store, an HTML5-based store solution for connected TVs, available for OEMs, developers and content providers. The solution includes an emulator and dedicated developer tools, and can be deployed on any set-top box, Blu-ray player or HD Ready TV.

Apple

Forrester Research predicts that Apple’s enterprise sales will increase 58% to $19b this year, and will double that again in 2013.

Google Chrome

The latest beta releases for Google Chrome have two important new features. Dynamic pre-rendering, based on heuristics and locally-stored data, of pages. When the browser is strongly confident that the user will click a particular link, it will preload and render the page. Another feature is that .exe and .msi downloads will automatically be scanned for viruses and trojans.

The latest beta channel for Chromebooks also offers support for OpenVPN connections.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Opera launched a HTML5-based app store solution for TVs

• The Dolphin browser was updated to 7.3 on Android and 3.0 on iOS

• Lenovo to launch first Intel-powered Android smartphone, the K800

• Samsung announced good Q4 2011 results, with 35 million smartphones sold

• Sony announced Xperia NXT, first Android smartphones without Ericsson

• HTC has had poor results in Q4 2011 results, selling less devices than Q3

• 1.67 billion phones will be sold this year, with 3G and 4G chipsets on more than half

• 16 out of the top 25 mobile companies by revenue are network operators

• Nokia confirmed North America focus and Lumia 900 device

• Nokia acquired Smarterphone, a producer of feature phone OS

Marketing and Public Reactions

• Mozilla Blog Post Announcing Firefox ESR

• Web Browser Grand Prix VIII: Chrome 16, Firefox 9, And Mac OS

• Firefox extended support will mitigate rapid release challenges

• Mozilla Gets Down to Business With Slow-Burn Firefox

• Mozilla Firefox Set to Get More Secure in 2012

Questions, Comments, FYI

• (Michael Verdi) What do y’all think about video recording and publishing these meetings for those that can’t be at them? I almost always attend this meeting and just realized it’s literally three clicks in my screencasting software to make this happen. Think about it. Let me know if you have concerns. Thanks.

• When will 3.6 MU be unthrottled?
  • Answer: next week with unthrottling of 9.
• When will UAC removal as part of silent update ship?
  • Answer: Firefox 12 with an asterisk.
• Why will we be possibly throttling Firefox 10 updates?
• Can johnath close this meeting with a cover of “Born This Way”?
• Can johnath close this meeting with an interpretive dance?
• Another potential vidyo room move (johnath)

Actions this week