Firefox/Planning/2012-02-01

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde 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# 95312 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312 (US)
• Vidyo Room: Warp Core
• Vidyo Guest URL

Actions from Last Week

• Lawrence will follow up about add-ons default to compatible on mobile (Dec. 14)
  • Add-ons will default to compatible on mobile in Firefox 12 bug 719921

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

• The 1/31 merge for 11->Beta and 12->Aurora is now complete

Release (3.6, 10)

• Firefox 10, Firefox 3.6.26, and ESR 10 all shipped yesterday (1/31)
  • See the release notes here

Beta (11)

• Going to build with FF11 beta 1 today

Aurora (12)

• Silent update – Windows UAC service in now on Aurora – few patches left to land to complete this work

Nightly (13)

• Snappy – CC and GC fixes going in this week. More on what’s happening in Snappy on Taras’ blog
• bug 455553 “New Tab Page feature” landed
• bug 90268 “move plugins to content – plugins should withstand a reframe of the object frame” is fixed.
• bug 563318 “switch trunk builds to use Visual C++ 2010” has happened

Telemetry proposal

• Opt-in rate has been low on Telemetry
• Want to collect more data earlier in the dev cycle
• Proposal to make Telemetry opt-out on Nightly and Aurora channels
  • Users will be prompted on first launch in the browser (existing users on first launch after opt-out starts) via a door hangar to inform that Mozilla is collecting data and to provide a link to more information including how to opt-out on these channels
  • about: dialogs will be updated to include a statement about data collection as well
• Telemetry will continue to be opt-in on Release and Beta
• Concerns can be added to bug 699806 or posted to dev.planning

Firefox Mobile

• ICS plugin support landed on trunk last night, it is awesome
• UA string changed
  • We are actively filing evangelism bugs now
  • File bugs in | Fennec Native / Evangelism |
• Native code and builds moved to Beta, but we are not “ready to ship”
  • Expect uplift from Aurora to Beta
• Start UX has improved and will continue to improve
• UI responsiveness has improved and will continue to improve
• AMO has added support for Native Fennec add-ons \o/

Firefox Sync

• has nothing new to report (as mobile will probably steal our thunder anyway 🙂 )
• old news that bears repeating
  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles
    • It may consume excess battery
    • Migration from XUL to Native will likely cause your sync account to disappear
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• Release today
• v1.0 release remains on-track for February 15th
• Working with marketing on various v1.0 launch plans

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Made two hotfix releases last week(1.4.1 & 1.4.2). Both related to pushing 1.4 into Builder
  • Post-mortem tomorrow to figure out if we could have avoided either of these hotfixes.

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Released 1.5b3 yesterday
• Still on track to release on Feb. 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Still on track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Firefox 9:
  • Fast Video Downloader updated and broke 3.6 users: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/915355 (Jorge has disabled it for 3.6)

• Firefox 10:
  • Norton doesn’t work (supposedly it has an update but we’re still seeing input around Norton)
  • AVG breaks the address bar (can’t press enter, must click GO): [1] [2]
  • Some comments around hidden/vanishing extensions. : [3] [4]
  • Possibly issues uploading maybe this oneor this one

Mobile

• Sprinting for FF11 doc updates to support NativeUI
• Firefox for Android meetup in SF is tonight!
• SUMO day is tomorrow

UX & User Research

• Australis project has feature pages, is getting staffed:
  • Tab_Strip_Visual_Redesign
  • Features/Desktop/Panel_Menu
  • Toolbar_Customization
  • Arrow_Panel_Redesign
• Basic research on Translation feature done, designs coming soon
• Metro UI (Win 8) design work in progress
• URL Autocomplete landed!
• New download manager about to land (and/or has landed), still some known issues
• New tab refinements continuing, landed on Nightly (preffed off)
• Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Opera

• Recent updates in the Dragonfly developer tool include better filtering in the Network Inspector, including both flow and table views of network requests, as well as some minor improvements to the Style Inspector.

• Opera also made some improvements in their address bar. It now weights the last visit, keyword positions, and number of matches when prioritizing possibilities.

Microsoft

• Perhaps due to their close proximity in the Seattle area, Amazon and Microsoft seem to have good relations. Notably, Amazon just released an SDK for their web services for the Windows Phone platform.

• Since the Windows 8 “Metro-style” version of MSIE will not support plugins, Microsoft posted some information about how websites can signal that their website will only work in the legacy/desktop mode by sending a specific HTTP header or meta tag.

• Microsoft also released IDBExplorer, a debugging tool for IndexedDB applications. It provides a tree view of DBs.

Google

• The Product Manager responsible for the Chromebook confirmed that while Google plans to continue to streamline its product offerings, the Chromebook is seen as a long-term play and will continue to receive investment for the foreseeable future.

• The Chromium team released the Javascript to Dart Synonym app, which allows Javascript developers to easily understand how to “translate” their Javascript applications into Dart.

• Google also released more information, targeted at users, about how the newly-improved Safe Browsing feature works. It “now analyses properties of each page you visit to determine the likelihood of it being a phishing page.” When the likelihood is higher than a certain level, it sends the URL to Google for further analysis.

• The dev version of Google Chrome now partially exposes users’ privacy preferences to extension developers.

• As discussed some weeks ago, Chrome now supports Google’s proposed “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields; it allows web developers to unambiguously identify fields as “name”, “street-address”, etc.

Webkit

• Interesting presentation: At a recent Javascript conference, Matt Seeley, a senior Netflix developer described how they work with an embedded version of Webkit in their product, which is now available in more than 450 low and high-end devices in more than 40 countries.

• Other recent additions to the WeKit codebase include an extension API providing information about screen brightness, and a debug page for Omnibox. The WebKit team is also building a performance test reporting system, using Mozilla’s graph server.

HTML5/ Video

• LongTail Video released their State of HTML5 Video report, showing that across both desktop and mobile, more than 2/3 of browsers support HTML5, with the remainder largely made up of MSIE 6,7, and 8. The report also summarizes the current level of support for various video tag attributes. Currently only Google Chrome and Opera support all of them. Other areas summarized include accessibility, adaptive playback and fullscreen support.

• A group of HTML5 evangelists have put together html5please.us, which summarizes the information behind sites like http://caniuse.com to present clear, actionable recommendations on which HTML5 features should be used or avoided, based on the breadth and depth of support across all browsers.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Android tablet sales reached 10.5 million units in Q4 of 2011 and accounted for 39% of global tablet market

• 5 – 6 million Kindle Fire tablets were sold in Q4 2011, but not generating profits for Amazon

• Apple might have become the top smartphone producer in Q4 2011, in close competition with Samsung

• The European Commission opened a formal investigation into Samsung’s use of its rights to essential 3G wireless patents

• ARM had very good results in Q4 2011, but facing increased competition from Intel

• Open WebOS 1.0 to be released in September

• Nokia celebrated the sale of the 1.5 billionth Series 40 phone

• A bill concerning the installation of monitoring software on mobile phones by carriers and OEMs has been proposed in the US

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Continuing to localize improved 3.6 upgrade billboards
• Working on marketing plans for next Firefox
• Putting collateral together for Aurora and Beta later this week.

Mobile

• Beta Snippets
• Beta FB ads
• Updating collateral on Beta pages

Press

• Firefox simplifies add-on updates; no native Android interface–yet

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

• Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10