Need To Know
Notices/Schedule (lsblakk/sylvestre/lmandel)
| Next Merge: March 30, 2015 | Next Release: March 31, 2015 | ||
| Trains | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Central: 39 | Aurora: 38 | Beta: 37 | Release: 36 |
Only two weeks and two beta builds until Firefox Beta 37 is released. The new “Tracking Firefox” dashboard shows tracked bugs for the Aurora and Beta releases.
Quality Programs
(An opportunity to hear about status with the various quality programs that do not have a formal team structure.)
OrangeFactor (ryanvm)
RyanVM sends a major shout out to ttaubert for being on an orange fixing tear last week.
MemShrink (njn)
Mike Hommey enabled jemalloc3 (bug 762449) on Nightly. It’s configured to *not* ride the trains for now. There are a number of perf regressions and some crashes that Mike is diligently working through.
Team Stand-ups
Media (mreavy)
The media team is close to shipping Media Source Extensions (MSE bug 1083588) for YouTube. MSE improves HTML5 video performance as YouTube transitions its default video player from Flash to HTML5 video. The team plans to ship MSE on Windows in Firefox 37, OS X in Firefox 38, and then Linux. Be on the look out for any YouTube bugs, such as videos that won’t load or get stuck rebuffering.
Performance (vladan)
Telemetry and FHR measurements were unified into a single system on Nightly 39 (bug 1069869). The old FHR will still be around for a couple of releases. The unified Telemetry client-side is still being “stabilized”, so Telemetry from Nightly 39 isn’t reliable yet. Be very careful when interpreting Nightly 39 data!
The unified Telemetry pings are sent to a new Telemetry backend (DataPipeline) which will support streaming analyses. The Telemetry wiki is now up to date with information about Telemetry client-side & server-side workings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry. We added a Telemetry “errata” page to help with analyzing Telemetry data: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/Errata.
Many Telemetry histograms will automatically expire in Firefox 40. Check Histograms.json to see if the expiry version of your telemetry probes should updated.
Test results comparing e10s vs non-e10s Talos scores and an explanatory blog post are coming soon. Results in very raw form: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=D7fr2EtM
Aaron Klotz created a tool for visualizing Windows attached input queues, as detailed on his blog: http://dblohm7.ca/blog/2015/03/03/attached-input-queues-on-firefox-for-windows. Attached input queues can cause odd problems like bug 1105386 where a page won’t load or render if the mouse is not moving.
With bug 1128768, we can now gather information about the amount of jank caused by different types of Flash content. This will be used to quantify the benefit of targeting Shumway at different types of Flash content.
Per-compartment CPU accounting (bug 674779) should land in the next week or two. Use it to report add-ons that use too much CPU or CPOWs (e.g. bug 1136923).
Shumway (tschneidereit)
The team’s current focus is playing Flash ads in Shumway instead of Flash. Using Shumway will reduce the number of Flash plugin instantiations, which is correlated with Flash deadlocks, and reduce page jank. Flash ads have also exploited Flash security bugs to install malware. Shumway should protect against many of those exploits.
Shumway now plays IMDb trailer videos on Nightly (bug 1137433) and substantial progress is being made on a verifiable sandboxed. An implementation of AS3’s meta-object protocol that should be pretty faithful to Flash’s and a new Shumway interpreter should land soon. This enables proper handling of SecurityDomains, a crucial Flash security feature.