Firefox/Gecko Delivery Planning: 2013-02-20

21-February-2013

Firefox/Gecko Delivery Planning: 2013-02-20

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

Schedule & Progress onUpcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Current Releases

Firefox 19 released yesterday!
We’re looking into a new instance of Radeon 6xxx crashes in bug 830531, impacting Win8
Also looking into early feedback around broken PDFs on Intuit sites bug 843217

Beta (20)

FF20b1 is being built, will be released Friday, see a preview of the notes here

Aurora (21)

FF21.0a2 will be released Friday as well

Firefox Metro

Iteration #2 Update:
- Remaining days in iteration = 2
- Points closed to date = 18
- Stories closed/verified to date = 3
- Reopened Stories: 4
- Priority 1 Change/Defect Stories: 1
- Remaining points in iteration = 97
- End of iteration status report will be delivered on Friday February 22.

Performance To Date:
- Confirmed Story Backlog: 19 ready for upcoming iterations.
- Legacy Stories: 13 remaining for QA testing (originally totalled 37).
- On Hold Stories: 10 remaining for Product Manager clarification before being moved into Story Backlog.
- Triage Work: 13 items for Product Manager to review before being converted to Defects.
- Stories to be Planned: 27 stories for Team to review, relate work items to them and assign point values.

Updates:
- As each story is completed (Fixed Status) it is submitted to QA for testing.
- If the story passes the functionality tests, then it is marked as Verified and if it fails it is reopened.
- Last week the team had completed 7 stories totalling 40 story points.
  - The Team had completed more points at the half-way point of Iteration #2 than all of Iteration #1.
- 4 of the 7 stories had quality issues and were reopened reducing our story point completion count to 18.
- This follows our ‘Definition of Done’ to ensure the project does not collect any ‘technical debt’ moving forward.
  - View Metro DOD
- This results in a release build being submitted to QA at the end of an iteration that is smaller but of a higher quality.

Upcoming Iteration #3:
- Review and planning session to be conducted on Friday February 22 and Monday February 25.
- Iteration #3 starts on Tuesday February 26.

Firefox Mobile

Current Releases

Fx19 Shipped: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Fennec/19/RC/1
Lightweight themes, Expanded ARMv6 support and Support for zh-TW and zh-CN are some of the highlights. We also worked on the streamlining Session Restore, cleaned up the way we store Favicons and Thumbnails, and added History expiration. The UI was tweaked in several places, including About:Home and the Awesomescreen. Content rendering was also greatly improved with: Tile-by-tile drawing, Low-res tiles and Mitigated locking.

We are hitting many DB related crashes during the upgrade. It’s difficult to figure out when some of the crashes are happening, but others are definitely happening during the DB upgrade. Risk mitigation meeting is happening today at 1PM Pacific in the Mobile Vidyo room. bug 791958, bug 829927, bug 752828

Beta (20)

More UI refinements were uplifted to Aurora late last week and will hit Google Play with Beta 1 coming up this Friday:
bug 837113 – Provide UI for closing tabs [closing tabs button has been removed
bug 841567 – Thumbnail title unreadable on tablets
bug 831021 – Toolbar curve jumps 4px on tab slide animation

Aurora (21)

Stay tuned…

Nightly (22)

The highly anticipated scrolling of the nav bar off the top of the screen has been green-lighted by UX and patch is under review bug 716403
Overdraw changes to help with responsiveness landed, bug 840868, bug 840871

Services

Firefox Health Report

Now reporting all data in the initial report scope
On the trains for Fx21
Metrics is starting to process and validate data from submitted reports
Lots of Telemetry probes to continue refining performance

Add-on SDK

Release (1.13.2 -> Firefox 19, 20)

Stabilization (1.14 -> Firefox 20, 21)

Development (Firefox 22)

final loader changes required for Firefox 21 landed to m-c, Mossop will handle uplifts to m-a
required PWPB changes landing this week, hoping for uplift to m-a early next week.

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Positive Feedback

PDF.js

Loved the PDF feature, made the feature a lot easier to use and faster. GJ!
The built in pdf viewer makes life so much better on a Linux machine. No I can view my annual tax report without hassle
I am SO happy about the new pdf reader (I’m using linux version). Until today, I cringed every time I tried to open a pdf, and half the time it wouldn’t work. THANK YOU
PDF Viewer => 100% Thanks
pdf view finally!!!!
built in PDF viewer (pdf.js) in Firefox 19 seems to totally kick ass 🙂

General

I really like that you are here for us user’s…it’s great that we don’t have to pay for you…lol… keep up the good work…
Congratulation for all team who work on Firefox, nice work for this newer release! Faster and fluid, HTML5 improvement and more secure of course. Together we build the world of “tomorrow”… Thanks!
Its faster than other browsers and user friendly
I am a web designer and firefox helps me to improve my work efficiency and speed. by the help of firefox i can work easily.
It just seems exponentially faster than internet explorer or chrome…. i cant believe anyone still uses them

Negative Feedback

PDF.js

Users don’t like being switched to pdf.js/don’t know how to change
Broken sites (Complete list sent to PDF.js team)
Don’t know how to download/save
Poor Font rendering (Example: https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/opinion/3576134)
Printing is broken
Lots of German feedback. Assuming it is about umlauts
Thai language does not display correctly

Mobile

We are watching for the various Startup crashers in 19, with 1 SUMO thread so far. Input doesn’t show any spikes (as we would expect) and Google Play lacks good STR/Info. We will still monitor this closely.

Market Insights from the Product Marketing Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

Google

Google Chrome will soon offer support for a (at present, Google-only) file synchronization service. Web app developers will be able to seamlessly use Google’s services to store data, letting users use apps on multiple devices more easily.

Tizen

The final Tizen 2.0 SDK has been released — the alpha version was released in the fall of 2012. Highlights include an enhanced HTML5 web framework, APIs for Bluetooth and NFC, and a full WYSIWYG Web IDE for development.

WebKit

There is some evidence that Apple may be upstreaming some of the changes they have made to WebKit in their private iOS branch.
Google employees have started a project to handle HTML tokenization and parsing on a background processing thread, which will help performance on multi-core devices.
Other WebKit members have added the Khronos WebGL conformance tests into the WebGL tree.

Other

Worldwide mobile data traffic will increase by 13x over the next four years, Cisco has forecasted.
The Pew Internet and American Life project produced a report stating that “a majority of current Facebook users … have at one time or another tired to the point of avoiding the social-networking site.

Mobile

International calls through Skype are equivalent to one third of global international phone traffic. In 2012, growth in the 490 billion minutes market for international calls was only at 5%, compared to the growth on cross-border Skype-to-Skype traffic of 44%, reaching 167 billion minutes.

Opera acquired Skyfire, a mobile browser and mobile network optimization solution. Called Rocket Optimizer, the offering for network operators reduces network overload by caching videos and large images in the cloud and serving them compressed to the network. The company claims that video represents 2% of user requests and 50% of bandwidth used. Skyfire Horizon is a browser extension platform that network operators can add to devices as a toolbar and means to promote their offerings.

The first testing version of Ubuntu for phones, the Touch Developer Preview, will be available on the 21st of February (tomorrow) and optimized for flashing on the Galaxy Nexus by Samsung and the Nexus 4 by LG. Canonical revealed the interface for the tablet version of the Ubuntu mobile platform, that is expected to make it into version 14.04, to be released in April 2014. It supports screen sizes from 6 inches to 20 inches and resolutions from 100 to 450 pixels per inch. Large screen optimizations include support for multiple user accounts.

Samsung launched a new line of smart – light phones, the Rex series, for the emerging markets. Based on Java, they feature Samsung’s TouchWiz interface (also used on Android), Google search and Google Talk, Facebook, Twitter. There are 2 browsers: Opera Mini and Access NF.

Google is rumoured to be planning to open retail stores in the US.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Marketing

Consumer facing highlight of Firefox 19 is the integrated PDF viewer. See press reaction to this in PR section.

MWC final prep: WebRTC will be highlighting – new – a video call taking place

Questions, Comments, FYI

~~(Axel, Jeff) who wants to be involved in discussing dropping locales without teams working on them?~~ pushing past MWC

Actions this week

John J to find out which browser(s) will be distributed with Ubuntu Mobile.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2013-02-20“

Planning Meeting Details

Wednesdays – 11:00am PT, 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)

Meeting Notes Meetings notes from the Mozilla community

21-February-2013