Meeting Notes Meetings notes from the Mozilla community

10-April-2013

Firefox/Gecko Delivery Planning: 2013-04-10

Filed under: Posts — Tags: — Jesper Kristensen @ 11:00 pm

Schedule & Progress onUpcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Current Releases

Beta (21)

  • FF21.0b2 for Desktop was released yesterday
    • Support for Social multi provider – (Mixi, Cliqz, MSN Now)
  • FF21.0b2 for mobile is with QA and will be released before end of week

Aurora (22)

  • FF22.0a2 – Updates were unthrottled last Friday, looks good

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 20 General 4.1/5 stars

TLDR: Most users are quite happy with FF 20. There are intermittent reports of slowness, perf, and addon issues.

Positive:

  • No other browser this week has allowed me to log in to my college campus so I could work online to complete my assignments other than Firefox.Firefox is the ONLY BROWSER That Works for me!! 🙂 Thank you..
  • It’s simplicity – no distractions or flashy messages on the front page, and it’s so easy and fast to use
  • I like it better than google. It seems faster and lists places to go on the bottom that I don’t have to type them in. Keep up the good work.
  • i don’t know much about computers but i have been using Firefox for at least six years and find it to be the best for me, its fast and easy to use and for me its just right/ thank you Firefox

Negative:

  • takes lot of RAM. I expect FF to load pretty fast with a very low mem requirements.
  • I like every thing about Firefox except crashes a lot. I like the new features, I can tell it is getting faster and the crashes seem to happen less.

Private browsing: 4.0/5 stars

TLDR: Used regularly 58% of the time, rarely/never 42% of the time. Still a lot of confusion over what it does but almost everyone says positive things.

Positives:

  • I used Chrome for private navigation and Firefox for day to day stuff.
  • Finally i will be able to dump Chrome for good! Hoorray!
  • I like that that now the private browsing function opens up another window leaving the original in tact. In general it looks and feels great, not sure really how helpful i can be.
  • LOVE THIS FEATURE

Some (minor) pushback:

  • You have changed things at the bottom of tools, and over in File you put in a New Private Window. I liked tools just the way it was and did not know that you were going to make this drastic change. I have been trying to back to version 18 or 19 to get tools back the way it was. I would be happy if you could put me back to tools the way it was. Enough said……….
  • I am still on the fence about the changes to “Private browsing”. I think I might have preferred the all or none approach before. I don’t understand the reason for the change, but can live with it.

Download Manager: 3.8/5 stars

TLDR: Mostly positive. The negatives are from users that either didn’t see a reason to change the feature or just have suggestions for improving the Download Manager.

Postive:

  • I like it, because it makes it easier than having a separate window just for downloads.
  • Its much easier to use…thank you
  • its about time you guys changed it. the new one is absolutely brilliant!
  • Keep on doing what you’re doing. If I can understand it, anybody can. Thx Firefox 😉


Negative:

  • I didn’t see anything wrong with the way it was.
  • Did it NEED to be changed?
  • May just have to get used to it. Old ways sometimes die hard 🙂


Feature Suggestions:

  • There needs to be a button to quickly clear the recently downloaded files, not just through the “Show all downloads” window.
  • I’d like it more if you added a pause/resume button to the left of the open containing folder button
  • It only shows bar & remaining, I will very much love it if it will show the download speed in first click.

Market Insights from the Product Marketing Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

Google

  • Google forked WebKit creating a new engine called Blink. While Google is able to remove “7 build systems, more than 7,000 files and 4.5 million lines”, the WebKit community is also cleaning house.
  • Chrome 27 Beta was released. Web content appears 5% faster, the Chromium team now uses benchmarks from webpagetest.org in their testing, a “simple, elegant user interface” for month, week, and date <input> types, live, low-latency audio support for the Web Audio API, the Sync FileSystem API for Chrome Apps, and other improvements.
  • Chrome now has a regularly-updated, detailed, feature dashboard for web platform work.
  • Chrome for Android now syncs passwords and autofill entries for logged-in users.
  • In likely effort to better support emerging markets with poorer bandwidth, select videos on YouTube are now available at a 144p pixel video resolution

Microsoft

  • Microsoft released [www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238278/Microsoft_takes_new_Scroogled_shot_at_Google another attack] in its “Scroogled” campaign, describing how the Google Play store passes users’ personal information to app developers.

Mobile

  • Facebook Home was released.
    • An app that extends into a whole phone experience, similar to a launcher, but with deep social integration, the product will be pre – installed on the HTC First.
    • It is available to install on a limited number of high – end devices (HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II).
    • Analysts estimate that Facebook Home is available to 10 – 15% of the current Android install base and with added support for Android 4 and later it can have an addressable base of over 50% of Android. Facebook’s current mobile user base was 29% on iOS and 38% on Android in December 2012, so analysts estimate that Home will be available to 20 – 25% of the current Facebook mobile user base and assuming Android v4 support it could reach 45 – 50%.
  • Microsoft, Nokia, and a number of top developers have filed a formal complaint to the European Union against Google’s use of its apps in Android. The accusation is of using Android ” as a deceptive way to build advantages for key Google apps in 70 percent of the smartphones shipped today”. This comes at a time when the European Union is in the final stages of an inquiry into the search offering of the company.
  • New version distribution numbers for Android put Gingerbread at 39.8%, Ice Cream Sandwich at 29.3% and Jelly Bean at 25%. The next version of Android, Key Lime Pie, is expected to be unveiled at Google I/O in May.
  • Today, an average US consumer spends 2 hours and 38 min a day on a phone or tablet, according to Flurry Analytics. 80% of the time is spent on apps and 20% (31 minutes) is spent on the Web. Games are the largest category in terms of time spent (32%), followed by Facebook with 18%. On iOS, the browser, Safari, comes on the third place, with 12%.
  • The Google Play Store was re – designed to optimize for discovery of entertainment content.

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)

Video/Teleconference Details – NEW

  • 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 99696 (US/INTL)
  • 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 99696 (US)
  • Vidyo Room: ProductCoordination
  • Vidyo Guest URL

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