Meeting Notes Meetings notes from the Mozilla community

9-February-2012

Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-08

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

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08

« previous week | index | next week »

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
REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren’t able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Contents

Actions from Last Week

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

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

  • We plan to ship 10.0.1 (both mainline and ESR) with the following changeset this Friday (2/10): 18ce5e304e97

Beta (11)

  • Barring unexpected issues, Firefox 11 Beta 2 will ship this Friday (2/10)

Aurora (12)

  • Aurora 12 desktop was out to testers as of 2/3
  • Aurora 12 mobile was out to testers as of 2/7

Nightly (13)

  • Safebrowsing move from SQLite to flat file landed (bug 673470)
  • If you’re seeing long hangs on Aurora 12 or Nightly 13, please comment in bug 725110
  • Safe Mode: Auto detect previous start-up failure and offer to start in safe mode bug 294260
  • [New Tab Page] Set to enabled by default on Nightly bug 716538

Firefox Mobile

  • No mobile beta this week
    • We are holding for performance issues
    • Schedule is being reworked
  • Hi, Chrome on Android
    • We will be adding Chrome to our competitive testing
    • Solid beta, but not intimidating

Firefox Sync

  • Sync now has a Product Marketing Manager. Welcome to Greg Jost!
  • Native Sync
    • did not go to Beta, along with native fennec
    • Please file bugs. Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
    • We have daily bug triage at 4pm
    • You can find us on irc, #androidsync
    • Old news that bears repeating
      • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles
      • Migration from XUL to Native may 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
  • Work has started on integrating BrowserID into Sync authentication
    • The two sync systems will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
  • Coming to a release near you
    • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
    • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11 (aka Beta): Addon Sync
    • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora (but not Beta)

Add-on Builder

  • release today
  • shooting new tutorial today
  • all systems are still GO for launch next Wednesday February 15th

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

  • Found a nasty and released 1.4.3
    • Important for developers using simple-prefs, simple-storage, or passwords APIs to take a look at:
    • Blog post explaining issue and fix
    • We wrote a module to help anyone affected “recover”

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

  • On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Add-on of the week!

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 10:

Mobile

  • FF10 Android market feedback is consistent with previous XUL releases (performance and flash are top issues). NativeUI will fix both of these problems.

SUMO Days update:

  • We started SUMO Days on Nov 3rd and we answered 58% of the questions asked that first day.
  • We’ve been working to grow the contributors to our support forum and improve the SUMO web content every two weeks since.
  • Last week, we answered 81% of the questions asked and we’ve made a big improvement in the overall average of questions answered. So, huge congrats to the SUMO contributors for their hard work to optimize the site content and get us on a path to answering every user question every day.

UX & User Research

Research

  • The Mobile Diary project is now in the hands of our users. The project will help us learn more about user attitudes, behaviors, and use cases. If you want to get an in-depth look at user needs, consider attending a participant interview, scheduled in the SF Bay area on Feb 15-16, 18-19, and 21st. Get in touch with Mary Trombley if you’re interested.

Design

  • Australis project:
  • Translation designs in progress
  • Metro UI (Win 8) design in progress
  • URL Autocomplete landed! Then disabled! Then hopefully enabled again! (might change to only complete for previously typed entries)
  • New download manager still awaiting landing
  • New tab refinements continuing, enabled by default, give us feedback!
  • Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

  • Google released a beta of Chrome for Android, based on a fork of the Chromium code (version 16.0.915.75). A major focus for the development team is to re-merge the trees; some of the work has been done. Because of the Java base of Android, a lot of work using Java Native Interfaces will have to be done, no doubt to improve device support.
  • Chrome for Android also has integrated support for a mobile remote debugger, allowing developers to debug or profile their mobile web pages and web apps using a desktop machine. Here’s a screencast demo. Developers are encouraged to ask questions on stackoverflow.com.
  • Google announced that Chrome would soon stop conducting SSL online revocation checks, using its existing software processes to distribute lists of revoked certificates.
  • The German government, in a general list of recommendations for computer security, recommended the Google Chrome browser, primarily because of its sandbox architecture.
  • Development versions of Chrome now feature a new Settings UI that is fluid and appears to make use of graphic acceleration; see the video at the link for a demo.
  • The Dev version also now has partial support for Web Intents — here’s a screenshot.

Microsoft

  • The Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be released on February 29 at Mobile World Congress.
  • The IE team’s blog posted a detailed summary of the upcoming support of CSS3 3D transforms, with some interesting demos.
  • In a related post, the team drew attention to the fact that IE10 embedded in Metro apps will have the same performance, unlike similar apps on iOS, which run more than three times as slow.

Opera

  • The W3C blog posted an interview with two members of the Opera team. They said among other things that Opera Mini’s proxy browsing / compression features make it so popular with users in developing regions that carriers use it in their advertising. There’s also an interesting summary of their vision for HTML5 on television sets.

Other

  • RIM has announced that all the code in their SDK for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform will be open sourced. Code is available at http://blackberry.github.com and development of the HTML5 SDK is happening in the open there.
  • There’s a proposal at the W3C for the next version of HTML to support accessing image metadata in the DOM.
  • Strangeloop Networks released a “State of the Internet” report that indicates that while the average site is 10% faster than it was a year ago, top-ranked sites are getting bigger and slower, with the average home page containing 98 objects.

Mobile

This week we are talking about Chrome for Android beta. Summary below, detailed report in your inbox.

  • Yesterday Google launched Chrome for Android beta, as a first step towards making Chrome the standard browser for Android version 4 and above. The release supports Ice Cream Sandwich, ARMv7-based devices, which currently make 1% of the Android install base and account for a 3 million addressable base.
  • The browser is based on Chrome v16 and V8 v3.8 and has a multi-process architecture similar to the desktop version. It does not have plug-in support, and lack of Flash in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market. An Android Central poll asking “Is a lack of Flash support on the mobile browser a deal-breaker?” has 47% of Yes answers and 52% of No.
  • Its UA String is: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-US; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) CrMo/16.0.912.75 Mobile Safari/535.7)
  • Speed, simplicity and personal are its main user propositions, while tab management, user data sync, the Omnibox and its multi-process architecture are the main promoted features. For developers, Chrome comes with a remote debugging via USB feature and boasts Web standards compliance, extensive HTML5 support and hardware acceleration.
  • Its positioning speaks to speed, personalization and extension of the desktop. Branding is persistent in the product on the New Tab page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the desktop: friendly, light, easy-going, simple and straight to the point. Tagline is “Your Chrome, away from home.”

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

  • Finishing 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads this week.
  • Finalizing plans for next Firefox release.
  • Finishing Up devices page and reworking content silos on mozilla.org/firefox and mozilla properties.

Mobile

  • Re-visiting positioning and marketing plan for Firefox for Android
  • Preparing for MWC
  • Video for Firefox 11 launch

Press

Questions, Comments, FYI

  • Do we have a plan for shipping Firefox 11 on patch Tuesday? If not, when/where will that be figured out? (bhearsum)
    • We will go manual only until we are comfortable unthrottling (late in the week of 3/11, or early in the week of 3/18)
  • Update on feedback: HTTPs problem seems to be “connection reset” errors when connecting to servers on non-standard ports (may be self-signed cert specific)
  • When should Push/BiPostal/Notifications appear as a product here? [ally]

Actions this week

  • ally to coordinate with greg jost on sync uptake metrics, and measuring the impact of the FF10 usability changes
  • laura to report on the state of persona/personas discussion
  • cheng to report back on connection reset issues with SSL
  • johnath to wrangle representation in this meeting for identity

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress