Meeting Notes

Actions

• jst and lmandel to find owner for Orange Factor bug 858948

Notices/Schedule

• FF 21.0 for Desktop and mobile was shipped this morning
  • Mobile push includes push to Google play store and Yandex store

  • Desktop Release notes : http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/21.0/releasenotes/
  • Mobile Release notes : http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/21.0/releasenotes/
• 22.0b1 is targeted fot go-to-build today and will be shipped before end of week
• Aurora updates are disabled – will enable on Friday to update to Aurora 23

Key Issues

Threads

• dev-platform
  • converting CPPSRCS to moz.build (mshal)

  • Follow-up on the Windows PGO issue (ehsan)
  • Dropped support for MSVC 2005 and 2008 (ehsan)
• firefox-dev
  • Speculative pre-connections control preference

Products/Projects

Firefox Desktop

• Social API
  • Shane Caraveo landed the “Share panel” (bug 818675), which significantly improves the social API’s “share” capabilities

• Form history/autocomplete back-end changes
  • Mark Hammond chased down the last few test failures blocking back-end refactor of autocomplete/form history (bug 566746, bug 697377)

• Australis
  • Work continues. Star button changes were reverted, several changes to the toolbar and find bar behaviors landing now.

• XUL Panel improvements
  • Mark Hammond landed some improvements to XUL panel positioning (bug 812943, bug 798226)

Firefox Mobile

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• Lots of WebRTC patches landed last week
  • bug 862883 Enable webrtc mochitest automation for FxAndroid

  • bug 866093 application crashed [@ webrtc::VoEExternalMediaImpl::SetExternalRecordingStatus(bool)]
  • bug 869477 WebRTC UI permissions no longer shown
• Reflow on Zoom on double-tap only patch has been r+’d, Scott is working through some breakage in the vkbOverlap test before landing bug 847872.
• ANR Reporter is ready for privacy review: bug 863777 – Teach ANR reporter to use the profiler to get a native stack
• Implementing WebSockets for bug 834033 – Implement Push Notifications for Android

Stability Wins

bug 778459 – java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: at org.mozilla.gecko.AwesomeBarTabs.updateFavicon()
bug 827248 – java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: at org.mozilla.gecko.AboutHomeContent.getTopSitesThumbnails()

Stability

• Benjamin Smedberg’s patch from bug 831768, which reduced Flash crashes and hangs by a quarter on beta, is shipping on release today with Firefox 21.

• Jan de Mooij deduced a testcase for #4 topcrash bug 851934 (outlook.com) from full dumps within 24h of being assigned there, and realized he had already fixed this for 22 in bug 867482! Unfortunately too late for 21.
• Is there anything more we can do about : bug 752828 – android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabaseLockedException: database is locked at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteStatement.native_executeSql(Native Method) on ICS ?
  • it’s one of the top bugs for all channels for FFX for Android.

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 8.66 (Previous Week: 7.63).

• No significant changes from last week.
• bug 861176 – “Intermittent cppunittests TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | TestSTSParser.exe | test failed with return code 4294967295 | Couldn’t get the profile directory.” Affects all branches. Needs an owner from RelEng.
• Suggestions for moving OF downward?
• 17 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.

Roundtable

• Get the most out of Mercurial. Upgrade to 2.5 or 2.6 and read gps’s blog posts at http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2013/05/12/thoughts-on-mercurial-%28and-git%29/ and http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2013/05/13/the-state-of-mercurial-at-mozilla/.

• Clang 3.3 will be released during the 24 release cycle and we’ll likely upgrade shortly after it comes out (froydnj)

Notices/Schedule

• FF21.0b7(our last beta) has gone to build yesterday and will be shipped tomorrow depending on QA sign-off

• FF21.0 build# 1 RC has also gone to build last night
• Firefox 21.0 sign-offs to be held tomorrow : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_21/Final_Signoffs

Key Issues

Threads

• dev-platform
  • We should drop MathML (bjacob)

  • Follow-up: Using an inbound2 branch as a hot spare for mozilla-inbound (ryanvm)
  • clang-format (ehsan)
• dev-webapi
  • Re: Comments on the proposed DataStore API (Jose Manuel Cantera Fonesca)
• governance
  • Privacy policy update for Firefox Health Report (jmenon)

Products/Projects

Firefox Desktop

Australis progress

• detailed updates in the etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/weekly-australis-checkpoint

• nearing milestone 5, “landing customization work on m-c” (bug 869104). This is a large re-work of how Firefox toolbar customization works, check out UX builds if you want a sneak peek.
• progress on tab styling continues

Performance

• Drew landed the background tab thumbnailing service. Uses a remote browser to capture thumbnails without main-thread impact (bug 841495).

• The JS Internationalization API has been enabled (bug 853301); there may still be some issues to work through, but people should start experimenting with it now

Firefox Mobile

Blog shout out

• • More xpcshell tests: http://gbrownmozilla.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/more-xpcshell-tests-for-android/

  • April Perf Checkup: http://gbrownmozilla.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/firefox-for-android-performance-measures-april-check-up/
  • Fx Android 4.5 stars: https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/f4488e366b91

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• We stopped packaging a whole ton of files as part of the multi-locale builds. If you see any regressions, please file a bug and CC :Pike. bug 792077, bug 848297

• Fixed regressions to async canvas updates bug 863223
• Add a force override preference for Reader Mode availability on low-mem devices landed in Fx23 bug 852417
• Dynamic Toolbar is being disabled for Fx22 but is still enabled for Fx23 so please keep on using it so we can make it great!

Stability Wins

• Uplifted to Fx22 Bug 863288 – java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.nativeDecodeByteArray(Native Method) at org.mozilla.gecko.AboutHomeContent/TopSitesView.getThumbnailsFromCursor(TopSitesView.java)

• Landed in Nightly: bug 864339 – Crash on ‘New PrivatTab@org.mozilla.gecko.mozglue.NativeZip.createInputStream(NativeZip.java:71
• Also landed in nightly: bug 863477 – SurfaceCaps assertion failure in GLContext::UpdatePixelFormat() when playing Flash video

Stability

• Nothing this week, we look decent on all channels right now (we need people to work on the harder, long-term issues, of course).

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 7.63 (Previous Week: 7.31).

• No significant changes from last week.
• bug 858948 (frequent Windows mochitest-2 leak) still needs an owner. Previous attempts have failed.
• bug 866470 (ASSERTION: Should not be trying to paint a background color if we don’t have one: ‘drawBackgroundColor’ in layout/reftests/bugs/289480.html) is recent, frequent, and un-owned.
• 15 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.

Performance

• First monthly performance meeting, decided on projects & goals: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance#Projects

• bug 644744: Whitelist I/O that must happen before UI is shown, warn on everything else

• Running Firefox with its profile on an SD card
• bug 868441: Bypass cache when lock held too long

• bug 852467: nsDisableOldMaxSmartSizePrefEvent runs on the gecko main thread, blocks for long periods of time

• bug 649216: Remove unnecessary delay when clicking tab close buttons sequentially
• bug 699331: Reduce impact of font name enumeration at startup

• Julian Seward: Profiler backend news

• Avi Halchmi: Tabstrip Animation Progress
• Irving Reid: Add-On Manager Progress
• David Teller: Project “Async & Responsive” Progress
• Vladan Djeric: Running Firefox with its profile on an SD card

Metro

• Although Metro work is riding the trains, it’s all behind an ifdef (MOZ_METRO) which is only turned on in Nightly.

• Current expected work complete date for v1 is November 19th, although it has been moving up due to faster velocity in the recent iterations (so it may move up more).
• Tier 1 status? No, but we will be. The main step in progress towards this is releng work to turn on mochitests (bug 864418).
• Waiting for OMTC to land for a bunch of panning/zooming work.
• Other than OMTC, largely what’s remaining for v1 work is front end work.
• Most of the progress from the Metro team is in the form of front end work.
• Elm users (Where Metro development began) have been migrated from elm to m-c.
• Software updates through the Metro interface, will be offered trough the about flyout and silently in the background.
  • Some changes for that included upgrading while another browser from the same install is open.
• May 13th – May 17th will be the 2nd Metro work week in the Vancouver office.
• Sprint 5 and sprint 6 were recently completed, and Sprint 7 is in progress.

Roundtable

Build system PSA

•  :joey and :mshal from RelEng are focusing on work that :gps are initiated on migrating Makefile.in -> moz.build
  • bug 847009

  • what other pain points are you hitting with the build system? PGO? universal builds? tests? please get in touch with Joey, Mike or Gregory

Should we switch from hg to git?

It’s becoming more and more clear that the version control system of choice for open source development these days is git. The question is, should Mozilla engineering switch from Mercurial to Git?. As most people already know, lots of Mozilla hackers already use git for various types of work, and some of our significant projects also already use git (Gaia, Rust, Servo, etc). Lots of Gecko hackers also already use git for their work on mozilla-central, through various conversions from hg to git.

One inevitable question that this raises is whether we’re also switching to hosting Gecko development on Github, and the answer to that question is no. We’ve been in talks with Github, but we will not get the reliability guarantees we need nor the flexibility we need if we were to host Gecko development on Github, i.e. Github issues not being powerful enough, pull request data outside of our control, etc).

As for switching the source control system from hg to git, here’s some of the benefits:

• Simplified on-boarding, people generally know git, but generally don’t know hg.

• We already mirror hg to git (in more than one way), git is already a necessary part of most of our lives and unifying our tools where we can is a good thing.
• Branches! The ability to have “everything you want” in a single local repository (independently of how the repositories are hosted remotely). I.e. m-c, aurora, beta, release, user repositories, project branches and more as needed, no matter where the different branches are hosted.
• No need for multiple local repositories, many working directories per repository.
• Simplifies the path for better review tools and change workflows.
• Opens the door for a pull-request like model for accepting changes.
• Better merge algorithms, no more orphan patches that no longer apply cleanly.
• Easier collaboration through shared branches.
• Full history, all of hg and CVS!
• OMG interactive rebase (squashing, removing, reordering, editing commits)
• ZOMG git add –patch (selective change committing for splitting changes into multiple commits).
• Works well with github, even though we’re not switching to github as the ultimate source of truth.

• New tool to learn for those who have not already needed to learn it.

• Performance of git on windows is sub-optimal (we’re already working on it).
• Need to incorporate git into our windows build tools.
• Lots of infrastructure work needed to make this switch.

Notices/Schedule

• FF21.0b5 for Desktop was shipped yesterday due to build specific AMD Radeon top-crasher – bug 865701

• FF21.0b6( our second last beta) is going to build today

Key Issues

Threads

• dev-b2g
  • (summary) Please consider implementing new B2G features in C++ instead of JS (jlebar)
• dev-platform
  • Introducing mozilla::Abs to mfbt, replacing std::abs (jwalden) (blog post)

  • Storage in Gecko (gps)
  • Proposal for an inbound2 branch (ryanvm)
  • New mfbt header: mozilla/PodOperations.h (jwalden) (blog post)
  • Increasing the platform meeting’s relevance for engineers (lmandel)

Products/Projects

Firefox Mobile

Blog Shout Out

WebRTC: enabling instructions and info on how to test. More is More: http://www.morbo.org/2013/04/webrtc-support-on-android.html
Highlights of the UI hackathon and more: http://planet.firefox.com/mobile/

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• Landed: bug 862448 – Fast fencing path busted when preserveDrawingBuffer=true

• Great progress on ANR dashboard. Also uplifted to bug 857413 – ANR: deadlock in IME code when using UI-thread-safe Editable
• Lot’s IME Fixes: bug 859452, bug 860158, bug 85921, bug 859212, bug 862069, bug 864521

Stability Wins

• bug 863288 – java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.nativeDecodeByteArray(Native Method) at org.mozilla.gecko.AboutHomeContent/TopSitesView.getThumbnailsFromCursor(TopSitesView.java)

Stability

• Something regressed “EMPTY dump” crashes significantly on Nightly, see bug 866526 – Ted saw those and IIRC says he saw Firefox hanging somewhat, then probably going OOM and crashing with those reports. If anyone has a clue what checkin on Friday (April 26) could have caused that, please comment in the bug.

• Mobile Nightly Crash rate has gone back down. Great job Mobile Dev team!

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 7.31 (Previous Week: 8.28).

• No progress getting Windows XP xpcshell tests un-hidden.
• Big spike in bug 707777 on Windows 8 this week. Currently unowned.
• 23 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.

Roundtable

• RelEng needs your help to improve test machine capacity!
  • We have some tests that are currently failing on Ubuntu, preventing us from re-using these machines as WinXP/Win7 testers. mochitests-browser-chrome and mochitests-others need to move from fedora–>ubuntu. Specifically, we need help with dep bugs under bug 834725
    • bug 838613: we are getting a value of 0 for a pointer in nsExceptionHandler.cpp::RegisterAppMemory()

    • bug 847558: on amazon ec2 vm’s browser_dbg_createChrome.js hangs (timed out) on opt builds
    • bug 860349: Intermittent browser_dbg_createChrome.js | application timed out after 330 seconds with no output
    • bug 848924: Intermittent Ubuntu debug VM reftest TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL

• (RyanVM) status of “birch as b2g-inbound”
  • birch now has 10-12% of checkins compared to mozilla-inbound.

  • 21apr-30apr: 48 (birch) vs 467 (m-i)
  • 14apr-30apr: 100 (birch) vs 807 (m-i)

Actions

• Clint to follow-up with Ted about review for bug 597064

• Jet to find owners for OrangeFactor bug 761987, bug 806046, bug 861158, and bug 858948

Notices/Schedule

• FF 21.0b3 for Desktop/Mobile was Shipped last week

• FF 21.0b4 for Desktop/Mobile going to build today , targeting release before Friday

Key Issues

• bug 863903 Disabling Fedora talos tests on mozilla-central & friends (catlee)

• bug 657789 Disabling ~50 locales on mozilla-central, and migrating users to aurora (catlee)
• birch continues to be used as a 2nd inbound for b2g development (catlee)
• Infra Load Meeting every 2nd Thursday 13:00 PT. If you’re interested in infrastructure load, please come! (catlee)
  • If you know of builds/tests that aren’t required, PLEASE let us know so we can turn them off

  • Go to tbpl, “Tree Info” -> “Adjust Hidden Builders” to see what’s currently hidden.

Threads

• Dev Kit – feedback needed (morgamic)

• Using a pre-processing flag to auto-disable features in later Beta versions (lsblakk)
• Revamping touch input on Windows (jmathies)
• W3C Proposed Recommendation: Web Storage (dbaron)
• Rethinking the amount of system JS we use in Gecko on B2G (jlebar)

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

• work week in Madrid last week, hosted by Telefonica (thanks!)

• almost 200 attendees from 9 partner companies
  • great contributions from all, many just starting and rocking it
• lots of great discussions and workshops on performance, memory usage, test systems and infrastructure, etc.
• Dietrich’s fancy dashboard for last week: http://people.mozilla.com/~dietrich/basecamp/madrid.html
  • we fixed 40 of the 59 v1.0.1 blockers (tef+) that existed before the work week

  • in total, 42 v1.0.1 blockers remain
  • lots of people scrutinizing the list to see if we can further trim the list of blockers
• 8 issues preventing start of 2nd round of partner certification
  • came to agreement today to begin this certification despite blocker bugs
• ongoing discussions about gecko version for 1.1, 1.2

Firefox Mobile

Blog Shout Out

Various ways to keep up on commits landing on m-c: https://staktrace.com/spout/entry.php?id=797

General

• Now available via Yandex store: http://m.store.yandex.com

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• bug 730445 You can now change the default search engine landed in Fx23, check it out!

• WebRTC still behind a build flag but being actively tested to flesh out issues prior to enabling
• Progress on reflow-on-zoom continues with the landing of bug 803719 and bug 800805, proposed next steps for perf issues, here: bug 836565
• This will make Android/Gonk code sharing a little easier: bug 864521 – Replace Fennec’s AndroidKeyEvent::KEYCODE enum with Android’s AKEYCODE enum

Stability Wins

• bug 859100 – java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.BrowserToolbar.canToolbarHide(BrowserToolbar.java)

• bug 859031 – java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.BrowserApp$8$1.run(BrowserApp.java)

Stability

• bug 856670 (js::RemapWrapper) is our #2 crash on Aurora 22, something made the signature go away on Nightly but we’re not sure why. Benjamin Smedberg thinks something might have reduced sizes of thread pools (indexedDB? DOM workers?) or reduced stack frame size, or similar (see comment 28), does anyone know what happened there so we have a candidate for uplift?

• Release crash rates are becoming quite low (1.63 yesterday – we consider everything below 2.0 to be “good”), multiple reasons – Flash 11.7 seems to be slightly better in hangs than 11.6, and then a number of signatures are down significantly in volume for unknown reasons, e.g. bug 812683 and bug 819028 (D3D11-6.2/Win7).

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 8.28 (Previous Week: 5.84) – 7.31 if bug 761987 is left out.

• bug 846156 (ASSERTION: mArguments wasn’t cleaned up properly!: ‘!mArguments’) has many clones and hits across a variety of tests.
• Still seeing many crashes [@ PL_DHashTableEnumerate] with “ASSERTION: (*(uint32_t*)(table->entryStore + ((uint32_t)1 << (32 – (table)->hashShift)) * table->entrySize)) > 0″ spread across many tests (i.e. bug 855185).
• 15 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.

Performance [Bi-Weekly]

• bug 859558: Project to eliminate font jank

• bug 830492: gps changed FHR DB’s behavior to require fewer fsyncs
• bug 844331 and bug 862599: Bug caused Telemetry submission rates to drop significantly, fixed now.
• Tool for comparing Telemetry simple measures. Make sure to disable mixed-content protection on the page
• Honza Bambas’s draft proposal for rewriting network cache

• David Teller’s project “Async & Responsive”

• Avi’s Tabstrip Animation Project and recent progress
• Irving’s refactor of Add-On manager storage
• Nathan Froyd took a look at Talos pageload benchmark data
• Julian Seward’s update on native stack unwinding progress

Memshrink [4th Tuesday of Month]

about:memory now has the ability to load and save memory reports as gzipped JSON. An improved UI and the ability to diff two profiles will be here soon.

Memory consumption on B2G is an ongoing concern. The amount of memory available to Gecko is a little over 100 MiB, so any app that misbehaves memory-wise can chew that up quickly.

MemShrink reports: week 93–94, week 95–96.

Roundtable

• The birch project branch will remain open for B2G development going forward. Can we turn off triplicate OSX/Windows tests (bug 864517)?

• Nightly uptake curves may be days later than you think: http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2013-04-15/chart-of-the-day-firefox-nightly-update-adoption-curve/
• Firefox Health Report is reporting that 10-20% of sessions on Beta channel are not terminated properly. gps is seeking explanations in bug 864537.

Actions

• [CARRY OVER] Asa to post a couple of Windows 8 hardware options for dogfooding Firefox Metro
  • Recommended Metro device list
• jst to work with dougt to find an owner for bug 846137
  • bug 846137 has been fixed. Thanks!
• Ryan to speak with glandium about what is needed to update gcc and file the required bugs
  • bug 859966 is filed to track switching over to gcc 4.7.

  • Work is being done on the date project branch. Need bug 857697 fixed before testing can continue.

Notices/Schedule

• FF20 Post-mortem was held this morning : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Post-mortems/Firefox_20.0

• 21.0b2 build #2 for mobile, went to build on Friday and pushed to Playstore on Sunday morning due to bug 861356
• 21.0b3 for Desktop/Mobile going to build today , targeting release before Friday

Key Issues

Threads

• Preparing for the next windows PGO build memory exhaustion (glandium)

• Annotating Commits (gps)
• Site permissions UI (dolske)
• [DATE CHANGED] Infrastructure Load Kickoff Meeting – Thursday April 18th, 2013 10:00AM PDT (ted)

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

• B2G work week Madrid

Firefox Desktop

• Masayuki Nakano killed the blink tag (bug 857820)

• mikedeboer landed a big search pref consolidation patch (which removes keyword.URL): bug 738818
• Australis customization work continues, the team is making good progress. Check out UX branch builds if you want a sneak peak.

Firefox Mobile

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• OdinMonkey landed on Nightly, Fx23 for x86 and ARMv7

• Lot’s of good changes landed and are in progress for Dynamic Nav Bar mostly for Fx23: http://bit.ly/11jW3Gh
• Gesture support for the new android stock keyboard (and touch pal)bug 859212 was uplifted to Aurora Fx22; follow up fix bug 852633 is in progress
• bug 857413 – ANR: deadlock in IME code when switching to background thread
• Work on WebRTC continues, still landed but behind a build flag so it’s not enabled, yet

Stability Wins

(Landed in Fx23)

• bug 843005 – Disable Android SQLite locking in databases for REL 11 and higher

• bug 858960 – java.lang.NullPointerException: at java.util.regex.Matcher.reset(Matcher.java
• bug 858808 – java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: java.lang.String.getBytes at org.mozilla.gecko.ANRReporter.fillPingHeader(ANRReporter.java) on Froyo

Stability

• Firefox 20 for Android continues to look awesome in terms of stability.

• bsmedberg is looking into memory usage in crash reports for bug 837835.

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 5.84 (Previous Week: 6.76)

• No progress getting WinXP xpcshell re-enabled. No activity in bug 597064 in over two weeks.
• Non-infra top 10 oranges without owners:
  • (#4) bug 761987 – Return of “the NSS crash”.

  • (#6) bug 806046 – Significant spike starting two weeks ago.
  • (#7) bug 861158 – Frequent robocop-2 crash.
• bug 858948 – Ugly Windows leak without an owner.
• 18 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.

Critsmash [3rd Tuesday of Month]

• Many teams confirm they have hit their security goals in Q1. Nice!

• We have a lot of possibly stale sec-low and sec-moderate bugs. Please consider a team activity to re-triage and clean up the backlog. Some teams have done this during work weeks with great success.

Roundtable

• Who are these managers and what do they do? – Blog post by lmandel about the role of dev, project/program, release, and product managers

• (catlee) – android tests now detect app name at runtime which means you don’t need to mess with in-tree branding to get useful results from try. bug 725703
• (catlee) – new Linux test hardware online on mozilla-central, mozilla-inbound and try. They appear under Ubuntu(64) opt talos tests as “Ubuntu(64) HW …”. If you notice any inconsistencies between their results and the Fedora results, please let releng know! We’re hoping to turn off talos on the older fedora slaves soon.

Actions

• dougt to find owner for top crash bug 836263

• Asa to post a couple of Windows 8 hardware options for dogfooding Firefox Metro

Notices/Schedule

• FF20.0.1 desktop go-to-build is expected today for bug 857672,bug 857291
  • This will be in QA’s hands tomorrow and is expected to ship by Thursday, Apr 11 .

  • All the fixes that are being taken into release are already in our 21.0b2 build, shipping EOD today which will give us an opportunity to gather more feedback

• FF21.0b1 was shipped last Thursday with FHR enabled
  • Check your browser’s health report by going to about:healthreport

• FF 21.0b2 Desktop only will ship EOD today

• FF 21.0b2 mobile will go-to-build today and released before end of week

• FF22.0a2 unthrottled last Friday

Key Issues

• WebAPI planned work (overholt)

• Capacity work in preparation for next week’s B2G workweek (joduinn/catlee)
• Downtime planning for *after* b2g work week, dates and details as we get it (firewall upgrade in colos)

Recent threads

• Request For Feedback: Ignoring signed add-ons in Firefox for Android (mfinkle)

• Proposal for using a multi-headed tree instead of inbound (updated) (kats) – (older thread for reference)
• Promises Proposal (dtownsend)
• About string removal in Aurora/Beta (mfinkle)
• W3C (dbaron)
  • Proposed W3C Charter: Web Performance Working Group

  • Proposed W3C Charter: Web and TV Interest Group
  • Proposed W3C Charters: groups within the XML activity

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

• 1.0.1 (tef), 59+10 (10 are NPOTB) blocker bugs, with another 25 nominated.

• 1.1 (leo), 114 blocker bugs, with another 54 nominated. MMS (delayed FC/CC) reviews and landings ongoing.

Firefox Desktop

Social

• Beta: new providers (Mixi, Cliqz, MSN Now)

• Aurora: add-ons manager management of social providers
• Trunk: installation of arbitrary providers

Firefox Mobile

Blog Shout Out

• Quit button removal, RSS Feeds, Reaching out to community, managing site settings and more: http://planet.firefox.com/mobile/

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• Web Audio was enabled on Nightlies. This bumps our HTML5 score to 431

• WebRTC: Alder branch merged to central preff’d off. GCP is doing some initial manual testing on 2.3 and will need help with 2.2 testing soon

In Progress

• Add multi-thread support to profiler bug 734691

• bug 854421 – Throttle requestAnimationFrame from compositor
• Android xpcshell tests (very limited initi{{al set) enabled on Cedar: https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Cedar
• Participation in Shumway work week
• Push API implementation bug 834033
• Initial evaluation of bug data yielded: bug 857353, bug 857413

Stability

• Firefox 20.0 release for Android has under 2 crashes per 100 ADI and around 25% startup crashes, both of which is lower than any release since we introduced the new “native” UI.

• Looks like bug 831768 decreased Flash crashes and hangs by a quarter or so compared to 20 Beta, we’ll need more data to make sure and define the wins better, but things look good for the moment.
• Need help with VM page profiling (Windows) to solve empty dump and unstable-product issues (see dev.platform thread)

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 6.76 (Previous Week: 6.09)

• Windows XP XPCShell and Android 4.0 panda robocop tests remain hidden.
• More progress needed on last week’s attention items.
• Help wanted on bug 846137 and clones (ASSERTION: wrong thread: ‘PR_GetCurrentThread() == gSocketThread’). We hit this across a wide range of tests.
• Frequent gcc crashes when compiling IonBuilder.cpp or Scope.cpp (bug 820796) are hurting infrastructure load. Progress upgrading to a newer version?
• 19 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.
• When working on fixing orange bugs, please take note of MDN’s guide to avoiding intermittent failures. Feel free to add to it with any other wisdom you have!

Snappy [Bi-Weekly]

• Current state of Firefox chrome hangs: [1]

• bug 856427 and bug 689418: Avi is working on adding vsync support on Windows
• bug 561450: mak removed a source of main-thread I/O in Places
• bug 753768: Yoric moved all Page thumbnails I/O off the main thread
• bug 764971: Do not show the throbber and the “Connecting…” text for chrome pages

• Profiler:
  • You can find Benoit’s write-up here: [2]

  • bug 734691: BenWa adding support for profiling multiple threads
  • bug 853358 and bug 734691: BenWa is adding profiling support to the plugin-container.exe process
  • bug 853864 and bug 853363: IPC message information is being exposed to the profiler (BenWa and Georg Fritzsche)

• Jydoop query tool for telemetry and crash-stats is now available

Games [1st Tuesday of Month]

• GDC success!
  • Unreal Engine 3 ported to the web using Emscripten/asm.js
    • Public demo releases soon

    • Current very low rez video has close to a quarter million views
  • Showing off the tech on the show floor at NVIDIA’s booth
  • Lots of press interest, close to 200 articles worldwide
• Huge thank you to all the individuals who helped make it happen
  • lots of JS improvements
    • ~20% parsing perf improvement on the demo, which was about a 5-6% win on general parsermark parsing

    • significant memory reduction during parsing
  • Gamepad API, pointer lock in non-fullscreen got checked in, though gamepad will likely need another cycle on nightly
  • Lots of Web Audio improvements
• Next focus
  • Mobile

  • Supporting advanced porting efforts

Mobile Web Compat [2nd Tuesday of Month]

Outreach

• Thank you to everyone who has responded to my request for help: Help Wanted: Firefox OS UA Detection
  • Additional fixes for avn.info.ve, lapatilla.com, laverdad.com, meridiano.com.ve

  • Confirmations that a number of additional fixes are coming
  • The best way to get sites fixed is with technical contacts, please share!
• Vimeo now works on Firefox mobile!
• Google Maps UI updated on Firefox for Android

Gecko

• Implementing generic versions of WebKitPoint (bug 850805), webkitConvertPointFromNodeToPage (bug 850806), and webkitConvertPointFromPageToNode (bug 850808)

• Do you like UA discussions (of course you do!)
  • bug 856699 Pick a UA string for fennec on Ouya

  • bug 850769 User Agent override including information regarding vendor/model about the device

Misc

• Req for Web Compatibility Engineer

Notices/Schedule

• 20.0 is live

• 21.0b1 is with QA – shipping Thurs
• Aurora updates are disabled – will enable on Friday to update to Aurora 22

Key Issues

• End of life for tinderbox.mozilla.org
  • bug 843383 for any questions, comments, cupcakes, or curiosity
• Test harness preferences moving out of automation.py
• TBPL job visibility policy – now documented

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

Project Stats

• Recent bug closing rate for B2G bugs (13-18 per week)

• Remaining 1.0.1 blockers (54): tef+
• Remaining 1.1 blockers (69): leo+
• Upcoming 1.1 milestones: April 5th, April 20th, April 26th (CS)

Recent Landings of Interest

• bug 853291 add Polish to b2g gecko

• Fix for regression in power numbers for voice call and music playback bug 853454
• Fix for SMS with alphanumeric sender address is not received bug 788441

Firefox Desktop

Snappy

• Page thumbnails I/O moved off the main thread: bug 753768

• Most content prefs consumers have been ported to the new async API: bug 831208 and dependencies

Firefox Mobile

Blog Shout Out

• March Perf Check-Up: No talos regressions & RSS measurements are improving,see: http://gbrownmozilla.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/firefox-for-android-performance-measures-march-check-up/

• Read about updated JimDB: http://www.jnchen.com/blog/2013/03/updated-jimdb

Usability, Responsiveness, and New Features

• Just landed: Enable IonMonkey on ARMv6 android buildsbug 855839

• WebRTC back-end will be landing in Nightly preff’d off – manual testing should be possible later this week
• bug 852714 – Amazon search URLs should include Mozilla sourceid and tag landed for Fx21

Quality of Life

• Debugging Robocop failures just got easier with screen shots now being generated for failures bug 854549 – Robocop screenshots

• ANR reporter is enabled for Nightly and soon Aurora, next steps include working with metrics to get better access to this data bug 839683 – Enable ANR reporter in appropriate channels

Stability

• We need someone to help with bug 836263 (issue in nsPrefBranch, connected to Crossrider add-ons).

• We get very few B2G crash reports from devices, anyone having a Firefox OS device should please use them as much as they can and send the reports!

OrangeFactor

• Past week’s OrangeFactor: 6.09 (Previous Week: 7.15)

• B2G emulator mochitests are visible again – thanks jgriffin!
• Progress adding logging for Windows XP XPCShell timeouts, but suite is currently hidden due to high failure rate – bug 856027.
• Android 4.0 panda robocop tests currently hidden due to high failure rate (mostly timeouts) – bug 855406.
• Items in need of attention:
  • Efforts to investigate bug 761987 (“the NSS crash”) have so far come up short. Any help would be appreciated.

  • Crashes [@ PL_DHashTableEnumerate] after “Assertion failure: (*(uint32_t*)(table->entryStore + ((uint32_t)1 << (32 – (table)->hashShift)) * table->entrySize)) > 0″ in many tests (bug 855185, bug 855793) need an owner.
  • Crashes in IPC tests after “Assertion failed: ptr_ != NULL, file ipc\chromium\src\base/scoped_ptr.h, line 93″ + “ABORT: CRT ERROR R6010″ (bug 819132, bug 820748, bug 856353, bug 856362) need an owner.
• 23 intermittent failures fixed in the last week – List – Thanks!.
  • WebRTC team fixed “the leak” (bug 833769) and another frequent assertion.

Metro [1st Tuesday of each month]

Updates

• Devices that can only run at DX9 are working with a temporary solution until OMTC has landed.

• Visual improvements to Firefox Start.
• Various issues with getting Sync connected fixed, auto-signup in Metro when signing up in desktop added.
• Touch caret + text selection landed.
• A number of top crashers fixed. ~4.5% ratio per 100 ADU.
• Lots of misc. bugs fixed.
• Last two sprint lists: here and here.

Noteworthy upcoming landings

• Firefox Start will be moving out of XUL and into <browser> for improved panning performance.

• New combined nav and app bar.
• Form / soft keyboard interaction problems are finally going to get fixed.
• Pending a graphics branch merge, OMTC will get turned on.
• mochitest-metro-chrome (and maybe a couple other suites) should be up and running soon.

Awesomeness

• cpearce has been fixing various dom api issues like fullscreen.

• jfkthame fixed and enabled hidpi support.
• Anthony Jones has joined in to help out with async pan zoom controller work.

Misc

• We’d love to get the profiler hooked up for graphics work (bug 850019)

• We need more daily users, currently @ ~500 ADUs. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors!
• If you don’t have a Win8 tablet, please get one and help out in testing!

Roundtable

• (catlee) New linux test hardware coming online. Test validation happening on Cedar branch. Once ready, we’ll switch these over to mozilla-central and friends, and then can recycle old hardware into more windows/osx testers.