WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-23
From MozillaWiki
« previous week | index | next week »
Friends of the Tree
- The People team would like to warmly thank Asa Dotzler for being such an emblematic figure for Mozilla and an awesome story teller. There’s been a great deal of interest generated by all his blog posts, resulting in a big increase of people actually viewing our career website. How many viewers, are you asking? Just 11,000 in just over a year! Thanks Asa!
- Mike Beltzner would like to nominate Chris Hofmann as a friend of the tree for his long standing and relentless work at digging into the corners of our beta feedback to help us better understand how to improve the stability of Firefox, and how to use our beta feedback to extrapolate to a final release.
- Stephen Donner would like to thank and nominate Tobias Markus for friend of the tree, for his awesome work writing Litmus testcases for the Add-on Collector, and being an all-around enthusiastic and friendly contributor.
- Users in our +50% market share country of Poland write in to thank: dbaron, Wojciech Moch, and Németh László for working together to find, analyze, and fix a bug in our spell checking/dictionary code that had been laying dormant and unobservable on the trunk since last Feb. and exploded in visibility in the recent 3.6 betas. Though some great work they found and fixed this problem last week, and helped to avoid a big regession for users in Poland in the 3.6 final release. see bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525581
- Aakash writes in “I’d like to nominate AaronMT and Aleksej for their bug-finding detective work they performed at our L10n+QA Test Firefox 3.6 Testday. Not only did they again show themselves to be great testers, but also real assets in providing help to the QA community within the channel.”
- Chris Ilias writes “I’d like to nominate Bo Bayles, for working so hard last week updating Support knowledge base articles for Firefox 3.6.”
Development Updates
Firefox
( Projects | Status | Goals | People )
- there are still over 80 blockers left to be fixed for Firefox 3.6
- many are fixed on other branches and need to be moved over
- some seem to be tracking bugs for stability issues, and may not block
- there are still several code blockers awaiting patches or review which should be the highest priority for everyone in advance of the long weekend
Firefox Future
- Vlad’s started some exploration for building Firefox on Android, if you’re interested in getting involved, drop him a line to let him know.
- Boriss and Mossop have some ideas about how to make the Add-ons Manager better
- Blair has got tab matches in the awesomebar working on tryserver builds; it’s hot!
Gecko
- Wrapping up remaining 37 blockers for 1.9.2. Watching and fixing regressions & crashes based on beta feedback.
- News from the CrashKill front:
- In last week’s discussion we talked about how to compare releases. We’re still refining it, but it’s a good starting point.
- Reminder: We now have the ability to block specific DLLs from loading. For the list of DLLs we intend to block, see bug 525103.
- Blockers:
- Team blocker numbers:
Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
- Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6
- QA is currently testing
- should give a go to build in a week
- Firefox 3.0.17 / Firefox 3.5.7
- should have a schedule this week
- likely targeting late January release
Thunderbird
- 3.0RC1 build 3 available
- please help us test and file bugs
- autoconfiguration of new accounts at various providers needs special testing
- we hope to label and announce as RC1 in the next small number of days
SeaMonkey
Mobile
IT
Release Engineering
- nightly updates available for Fennec linux mobile
- l10n nightly repacks for Fennec desktop builds (mac/win32) are working again
- geriatric testing master has been setup, running unittests on older nonsse / ppc machines: http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=GeriatricMachines
- please report any fallout from the power outage this past weekend
QA
Test Execution
- Tested and shipped Firefox 2.0.0.20 to 3.0.15 Major Update
- Continued with Firefox 3.5.6 and 3.0.16 bug verifications. Closed most security bugs but have many non-security bugs to close
Web Dev Testing
- Shipped a special release of AMO 5.3.1.
- SUMO 1.5 – Tested the new Forum search. Blogged about testing SUMO search.
- Selenium – Created a logic framework in Selenium for verifying details on persona page.
- Spread Firefox – Verified bug fixes and testing prior to release.
Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
- Community
- Held a successful L10n+QA Test Firefox 3.6 Testday’ last Friday. Top testers: Aleksej and AaronMT! [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=l10nfxtestday 11 bugs files!
- Held a very successful Open Source Meet-up in Munich with about 50 People attended during the evening, talked about Mozilla and get-involved. See photos.
- Today there will be another Open Source Meet-up in Leipzig, Germany. This is our first Open Source Meetup outside of Munich.
- Accessibility-
- Having trouble with different version of builds. Local builds, even when built for release, sometimes behave differently than regular nightly builds coming from the Mozilla build bots. Try-server builds also don’t always behave the same. Couldn’t reproduce some crashers when a nightly build reliably did. This made testing a bit extended since we often had to wait for a regular nightly to show some difference.
- Finished first article for German Webkrauts. It’s about good markup for form controls and their labels. It hasn’t been published yet.
Test Development
- We just finished Sprint 2 last week and have some updates:
- Mozmill 1.3 is Released
- Making good progress on the Orodruin (XPCShell is Completed) and Crash Automation (Crash Log Parser is completed) projects
- Electrolysis Test code for E10s plugins has landed in the E10s tree. Delving into E10S Talos support next.
- More Notes here.
Security
- No updates this week.
Marketing/PR
PR
Personas Video
- We’re shooting today from 12:00 on!
- Details
Five Years of Firefox
- Rome Catch the Fox activities
- Great coverage from Italy around the anniversary.
- Hyderabad Party Recap:
- Please, please make sure your photos make it on to Flickr tagged with Firefox5
- We’ll start looking for “Light the World with Firefox” winners after the American Thanksgiving holiday.
- MCC Challenge
- Please submit designs and vote.
- Check out the designs such as this one.
General
- Mozilla Facebook Security Quiz launched on Thursday. It is a 5 question quiz designed to teach users some quick tips and how to stay safe online. Learn more about the quiz from the Mozilla blog post.
- Firefox Testdriver Facebook Group launched on Wednesday. The group is intended to encourage Facebook users and a wider group of people use Firefox betas. At point of destination, people can post in the discussion group their feedback and ask questions. 800+ members so far.
Events
- Add-on-Con December 2009, Mountain View, CA. We are sponsoring this event and will have 3 sessions: Taking Flights with JetPack (Aza), Mobile Firefox Add-on Development (Mark Finkle), Future of Add-on Ecosystem (Justin, Nick, add-on developer community member). <span style=”text-decoration: underline;” />There will be an Add-ons workshop on Thursday night 12/10 where we will be working on 3.6 and fennec compatibility. More details and signup to come soon.
- Sunlight Labs Great American Hackathon December 12-13, 2009; Mountain View, CA. We will be holding a hackathan at Mozilla HQ on Saturday and Sunday 12/12-12/13. Signup form and details to come soon. There will
- Foundations of Open Media Software January 13 – 15, 2010; Wellington, New Zealand. Perfect venue to promote open video. We are currently looking into sponsoring this.
- Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2010 January 20-22, 2010; Madrid Spain. We are sponsoring this event.
- SXSW Interactive 2010 March 12-16, 2010; Austin, Texas. Working on sponsorship oportunities and Firefox party. Please continue to check our wiki page for information.
- Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 2010) June 10, 2010; Toronto, Canada. We are sponsoring this event.
Support
- Firefox 3.6 support documentation update to be completed today with a lot of help from Chris Ilias and our fantastic Knowledge Base community. See the plan and the progress
Metrics
- Firefox Market Share
- Gemius, which has the largest sample size of any market share provider, has started creating a custom report aggregating their entire sample. The data show that Firefox surpassed IE in market share a few months back and is now poised to hit 50%.
- Gemius data includes traffic from ten countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Evangelism
- No updates this week.
Labs
- We’re releasing Weave 1.0 beta 2 today, which fixes some bugs found in beta 1.
- Released Personas 1.4
- Personas has partnered with its first overseas brand, so you can now bring Bollywood to your browser
- Personas hit 10.1 million downloads!
Developer Tools
- No updates this week.
Add-ons
- 3.6 compatibility up to 58%
- Engaging with a number of high probability authors who will bump this number by ~10% or more when they flip to 3.6.
- Blog from Jenny Boriss on redesigning the Add-ons Manager
Webdev
- Facebook quiz launched.
- Lots of ongoing stuff, no other updates.
L10n
Product stuff
Web stuff
Tools
- Verbatim should have a soft launch today
Testing
- L10n testing partner, Multilingual QA, will test the following versions of Firefox 3.6 in advance of the launch
- Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, Chinese (Traditional), Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, Norwegian (bokmål), Portuguese (Portugal), and Indonesian
- This list is assembled by looking at the top 25 locales (by ADU pings) and removing the localizations where we have very large communities with individuals responsible for community-driven QA.
Foundation Updates
- Just one week left to enter the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge; the deadline for submissions is this Friday, November 27, at midnight Pacific time.
- First two Drumbeat local events scheduled for December, one in Singapore and one in Bangalore. Goal: get people to pitch open web project ideas that feed into the Drumbeat pipeline. If you know people in those cities, please promote.