WeeklyUpdates/2009-04-13
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Friends of the Tree
Alix would like to thank Marcia Knous and guest stars Karen Prescott and Juan Becerra for their help in creating a tutorial video for the community.
Development Updates
Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
- Firefox 3.0.9
- On track for beta release this Wednesday
- Planning on shipping final on Tuesday or Wednesday next week
- Firefox 3.0.10
- Aiming for mid-late May release
- Code freeze in 9 days
Gecko 1.9.1
Firefox 3.5
Firefox Front End Work
- 9 blockers left for final release, only 2 of which are complicated
- we are string frozen
- code freeze Wednesday April 15th
- release late in week of April 20th
- first draft of the plan has been posted
- please add your comments/feedback on the discussion page or in the dev-apps-firefox thread
TB 3
- Thunderbird 3.0b3 schedule pushed out one week to make room for front-end refactoring required by search UX changes.
- There are lots of juicy 3.0 blocker bugs to hack on (both easy and more challenging), and we’d love extra help:
- Interested folks should contact mailto:dmose@mozillamessaging.com to learn more…
Mobile
IT
Load Balancing
- Appear to have hit Cisco bug CSCsr96168 on the ACE load balancer
- Took fxfeeds.mozilla.org offline for a couple hours Friday
- Pushed out-of-window upgrade Saturday (and no one noticed!)
Virtualization
- Upgraded four Build ESX servers
- Replaced 3 year old HP DL385s running ESX with 4 new BL460 blades
- Old: 2x Opteron 275 2.2Ghz (4 core total) + 8GB RAM
- New: 2x Xeon 5450 3.0Ghz (8 core total) + 32GB RAM
- Added another iSCSI storage array to the current cluster
- Working on getting OSX Virtualization up this week
- SeaMonkey bug 464325
- AMO Editors bug 483018
Release Engineering
- FF3.0.9 ready for beta Wednesday
- powering off Firefox2 machines, details in bug 487235
- new ESX hosts last week
- one died the next day, hardware failure
- more slaves coming online (6 linux, 6 win32).
- try server builds are now kept for 14 days (newsgroup thread)
QA
Test Execution
- Fx3.0.9 testing in progress, needed a respin on bug 487345
- Bug Verifications last week
- 109 1.9.1+Trunk bugs verified (core/firefox/toolkit)
- 40 1.9.1 bugs verified
Web Dev Testing, Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
- Tomcat talked at the CMT Marketing Meeting and Evangelism Meetings about MozillaMeetups and CafeOpenSource and set a date for the first munich meetup!
- First ever testcase automation testday on Mozmill 1.1! (8 testcases created, 5 bugs found, 3 new mozmill users)
- Mozilla QA Facebook Group now created
- QA Meetup in Mountain View on Wed, 4/22
- If you can attend, please add yourself to the Participants list!
- Shipped AMO 5.0.4
- Shipped SUMO 1.0.1 (SHOWFOR support for Firefox 3.5)
- Pushed another round of Personas website updates
- Worked on verifying SUMO 1.0.2 bugs
Test Development
- Q2 Goals are on m.d.planning, let us know if you have any feedback.
- Notification subsystem for QAC is in progress, should land this week
- Working on getting –enable-tests to build on Windows Mobile
Security
- Lucas and chofmann at Black Hat Europe (Amsterdam) this week and Hack in the Box (Dubai) next week.
Marketing/PR
General
- Published an update on our activities in Brazil
- Campus Reps brownbag this Wed. 4/15 @ 1pm! Open to all, will be available on Air Mozilla.
- Spread Firefox: We’re still working on the Affiliates program and will post an update on the launch soon.
- Next Community Marketing call is Wednesday, April 22nd, at 10am PDT. Dial-in Info: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#. Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. For those that can’t make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on irc.mozilla.org.
PR
- Moz Easter egg in Tech Crunch
- SUMO in the news
- Ubiquity progress in Lifehacker
- CNET profiles Weave
- Asa Dotzler’s blog post sparks discussion on CNET
- Top 10 Firefox extensions
Events
- Mozilla Europe Community Tour: Community members Sonny Piers, Grégoire Coustenoble & Arzhel Younsi have kicked off a 3 week tour visiting other community members in Eastern Europe and Balkans.
- Black Hat Europe, April 14 – 17, Amsterdam: Lucas Adamski and Chris Hofmann are attending.
- MozDK meetup, April 18, Copenhagen, Denmark: William Quiviger is organizing a meetup in Denmark and will be joined by Chris Hofmann.
- Hack in the Box, April 20 – 22, Dubai: Lucas Adamski and Chris Hofmann are attending.
- JSConf, April 24 – 25, 2009, Washington, D.C.: Mozilla is signed up sponsor. John Resig and Kevin Dangoor are speaking!
- NTEN Conference, April 26 – 28, 2009, San Francisco: They are looking for volunteers:
- Day of Service, Sunday, April 26th: Two opportunities:
- Strategy consults, 9 a.m. – 11 a.m.: Organizations are looking for everything from technology help to marketing and fundraising tips. Sign ups here.
- Help install wireless networks at St. Anthony’s in SF’s Tenderloin district or on Treasure Island. Sign ups here.
- Day of Service, Sunday, April 26th: Two opportunities:
Support
- No updates / Easter Monday
Metrics
- Recent Installer Feedback initiative:
- story about it by tgdaily.com received some significant attention on digg.
- between the posts, 120+ comments about the Firefox installation experience.
Evangelism
- Weekly meeting notes are here:
- Push to get the messaging bits done for 3.5. See that work here:
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Evangelism/Firefox3.5
- Thanks to sheppy for filling in the web dev bits
- Performance looking pretty good for 3.5 and we have a lot left to do
- Have a look – we’ve done a pile of great work this release
- Gecko reflow video
- Lots of discussion of the HTML5 + XHTML2 working group post
- SQL / Storage discussion
- Mozilla Developer Center:
- Now starting the process of our MDC upgrade to Deki Lyons. This will address many of our outstanding issues with MDC’s capabilities (although not all of them).
- Work is ongoing on planning and implementing improvements to MDC through templates and eventually extensions. See the proposed roadmap for more details.
Labs
- auto-updating Snowl development builds are now available; see this blog post for the details
- Aza’s blog post about mouse-based Taskfox
Developer Tools
- Had our first Weekly Update meeting ourselves
- April is “Usable” month where we are cranking on getting Bespin dogfoodable. More info on the newly updated Roadmap
- Usable features got in such as:
- “search” has been checked in
- quickopen cache fixes now make quickopen much more usable
- “bindkey” will now tell you which key bindings you have
- dealing with focus bugs
- VCS commands checked in
- Debugger UI concepts in
- smart gutter width
- Bespin Editor Component now able to read in settings from the constructor
- Plenty of infrastructure work and clean up (e.g. testing)
Add-ons
- 5.0.4 release last thursday
- Removing experimental flag got coverage in lifehacker comments are 100% positive; unprecedented milestone in the history of tech blogging.
- downloads since change are consistently up week over week for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday post launch by around 5%, will continue to see if trend continues
- new registrations on site down 80% (which is expected and positive)
- 5.0.5 underway
- for Q2 overview
- Category page redesign
- editor reports
- New Developer Agreement/source code license
- Compatibility Update
- 86% compatible with some version of 3.1
- 68% compatible with 3.1b3 and above
Webdev
- SUMO 1.0.1 pushed last Tuesday
- AMO 5.0.4 pushed last Thursday — read more on Add-ons blog
- AMO has 1000 passing unit tests
- Spreadfirefox – delayed a week to fix issues with affiliates tracking
L10n
- With code freeze just around the corner, we have made the call for all locales who wish to opt-in to the beta 4 release
- Pike, Pascal, and Gandalf are now working on enhancing the Mozilla l10n dashboard, making it a tool we can use for better communication with localizers
- Gandalf is working on a sign-off feature that will allow localizers to sign off on which builds to include in the build and release process, rather than having to opt-in via email.
- Pascal has added a more discoverable sign up for RSS for all outstanding web-l10n bugs
- Pascal met with Slater today to discuss the localization needs for the Mozilla website for the Firefox 3.5 release
- The items for a locale to complete for it to be considered a non-beta version likely will include the following:
- Getting Started page
- First Run page
- What’s New page
- Download landing page
- The major update “billboard”
- Google Snippets
- If it seems like a lot of work, it is. But, please keep in mind that it should be less work than what was required for the Firefox 3.0 release.
- The items for a locale to complete for it to be considered a non-beta version likely will include the following:
Foundation Updates
- The Mozilla Education / Creative Commons Open|Web|Content|Education online course is ongoing; session three will be later this week, with Chris Blizzard presenting on open web technologies. We have preliminary copies online of the week 1 slides, Q&A transcript, and audio (Ogg, 26MB), and week 2 audio (Ogg, 16MB). (Thanks go to Wendall Cada for providing the audio files.)
- Updates to www.mozilla.org include a new “Mozilla on social networks page.
- We’re still looking for more volunteers to help with www.mozilla.org; for more information please see our guide to how to work with the site.
- Check out the visual list of Mozilla-based applications? If you know of more applications please contact David Boswell
- We approved a CA request from T-Systems (bug 378882).
- Last week the Foundation team participated in a virtual work week; in the coming weeks we’ll be posting more materials from the various projects we worked on.