WeeklyUpdates/2009-08-03
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Friends of the Tree
Dietrich writes “I’d like to thank Ehsan Akhgari and Nochum Sossonko for speedily
fixing some bugs I filed for clean-up and consolidation of some of the core
Javascript code in Firefox. Also thanks to Neil Deakin, Gavin Sharp
and Dão Gottwald for comments, speedy reviews and landings of those
patches.”
Boris writes, “I’d like to thank Timothy Nikkel for diving into all sorts of scary parts of layout and bringing them to heel and especially for coming up with a fix for bug 494546.”
Sethb writes, “FotT has to go to Pascal Chevrel who has been managing all the complexities of long, short, and other numeric scales in the localization of 1 billion download campaigns. Just check this bug to get a sense of the fun: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507650 ”
Juan writes, “3.0.13 and 3.5.2 were emergency releases and we needed all the help we could get. Tim, Tony and Clint proposed we contact some of the more active community members to see if they could help with the usual QA cycle. The following people helped quite a bit and I would like to nominate them: Gabriela Montagu, Tyler Downer, Tanner Young, and Kevin Brosnan. I addition, a special thanks to Anthony Hughes, our QA intern, who really helped out us on Saturday, and did most of the QA work that day, when we were very short on people. ”
Mary writes, “I’d like to nominate Otto de Voogd as friend of the tree. He has been an awesome member of the Spread Firefox community since 2005 and runs one of the key SFx projects — Community @ SFx. His Firefox download counters were an instrumental part of the 1 billion celebration.”
And from last week, Melissa nominated nominating:
vineel reddy, moh haghighat, ken saunders, and kevin gerich. They all have recently helped out with mozilla pr efforts by speaking with reporters for stories with BusinessWeek and The New York Times”
Development Updates
Firefox
Firefox Front End Work
Firefox 3.6
- Tree is open, but code freeze is imminent, waiting on the conclusion of the last few blockers.
- Featuring:
- interruptible reflow
- content sink refactoring
- compositor phase 1
- performance and responsiveness fixes
- support for Aero Peek (maybe?)
Namoroka
Team News
Gecko
- Wrapping up remaining blockers for 1.9.2 alpha freeze.
- Still putting the final touches on, but Chris Jones is wrapping up the remaining work on Infallible malloc Stage 1. Read more here. Hopefully, this will result in a significant reduction in code size (some say 10%), reduce the need to do OOM checking manually, and can be a security improvement (unhandled malloc() failures can be exploitable, etc)
- Turned on chrome JIT today (bug 500304).
Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
- Firefox 3.0.13
- original Firefox 3.0.13 release is now Firefox 3.0.14
- short cycle release to fix new issues announced at BlackHat and Defcon
- shipping today
- Firefox 3.5.2
- release includes fixes for new issues announced at BlackHat and Defcon
- shipping today
- Firefox 3.0.14
- code freeze is tomorrow at 11:59pm
- targeting early September ship date
- Firefox 3.5.3
- code freeze is in one week on Tuesday, August 11, 11:59pm
- targeting early September ship date in sync with 3.0.14
- Thunderbird 2.0.0.23
- hoping to freeze this week
- possibly shipping at the end of this week, more likely early next week
TB 3
Mobile
IT
- Prep work for releases this week
- No big updates this week
- A number of us were out at last week’s Blackhat/Defcon.
- Others were on vacation
Release Engineering
- Releases:
- Last week: Funnelcake 09, FF3.5.2, FF3.0.13, refreshed MU
- This week: FF3.6a1, TB2.0.0.23, Fennec 1.0b3
- Branches:
- Places, Electrolysis done
- preparing for mozilla-192 branch
- downtime for TP4 rollout
- tp4 will be enabled on mozilla-191, tracemonkey; already on mozilla-central, places.
- see details in newsgroups
QA
Test Execution
- Fx3.5.2/3.0.13 shipped to beta on saturday.
- Shipping to World today @ 2pm
- Next up, TB 2.0.0.23 testing (assistance from TB team)
- First run of automated software update tests on OS X for Fx3.0.13/3.5.2
- Adding test coverage to Fennec test execution
- Working with Nvidia offshore team on Tegra testing. testplan is implemented
Web Dev Testing
- AMO: Working on having complete set of test cases in litmus for collections for 5.0.9 release.
- SUMO: Tested the maintenance release 1.2.1 which shipped Thursday. Updating existing SUMO test cases to be more accurate and efficient.
- Spread Firefox: tested 3.0.3 fo release last week.
- Landed TMZ and twsmith’s Selenium testcases TMZ: [1] and AMO, 3 Selenium testcases. twmsmith: SFx – 8 Selenium testcases relating to login
Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
- Community:
- Several very active community members helped us with 3.0.13 qnd 3.5.2!!
- Attended a very successful Launch party in Munich. Attendees included people from IT Departments of EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company) and Web Development Companies. Some people signed up for the QA Betatesters list.
- Participate in Testday this friday, Aug 7th, on Mozmill 1.2 Automation Testing!
- Join the QA Meetup next wednesday, Aug 19th, to talk about Code Coverage and metrics. Presented by Tim and Murali
- Metrics
Test Development
- Aided with the 3.5.x and 3.0.x effort by helping verify crash bugs were fixed
- Have an entirely extension-bundled reftest/crashtest framework for use on mobile devices
- The new QAC is about to launch in the next few days
- HTML Parser test suite is nearing completion
Security
- Black Hat 2009 was well attended by members of several Engineering teams.
- No major surprises. Critical bugs discussed at BH were disclosed to Mozilla in advance.
- Firefox 3.5.2 (not affected by BH bugs) and 3.0.13 released August 3.
Marketing/PR
Firefox 3.5 Launch
- Firefox 3.5 Swag Requests: We now have 409 requests for swag packs for 3.5 launch parties. The request page has now been taken down as of August 1st. If you need swag or support for a party please contact Sarah.
- Firefox 3.5 Parties: Have been collecting photos and write-ups for all of the Firefox 3.5 parties that I will share next week. Parties have been taking place in Brazil, Mexico, India, Spain, Philippines, Nicaragua to name a few.
PR
Community marketing – Firefox Billion downloads
Mozilla Service Week
- Partner update: We’ll announce our new friends of the program tomorrow!
- Friends to-date:
- ES, DE & FR scheduled for August 10th.
- We could use help QA’ing them. Stage info:
- Follow us on Twitter: @mozservice09
Events
- Maker Faire Africa August 14 – 16, 2009, Accra, Ghana – We are sponsoring this event and will have a presence at MFA. Our mission is to help bring together the local L10n community. Check out the wiki for early details.
General
Support
- Cheng Wang is joining the SUMO team full-time — Welcome Cheng!
Metrics
- 1 Billion Firefox downloads surpassed
- With the 9th edition of Funnelcake, which shipped last Tuesday, we slipped in a modified version of the Fx installer, asking people if they were interested in leaving feedback
- Published initial analysis. More to come.
- We found that a single fix we recently integrated into the installer (based on previous feedback) will lead to an improved experience for roughly 2,000,000 new Fx users
- Thanks to Rob Strong
- Welcome Blake Cutler
- Blake was our analytics intern last summer. He recently graduated from Stanford and joins the metrics team full-time today.
Evangelism
- Mozilla Developer Center
- Documentation for Firefox 3.6 underway; see Firefox 3.6 for developers. Also see this blog post for information about how to make sure stuff gets documented.
- Back-end work on MDC continues, with some new features added, and others coming soon.
- Upgrading to MindTouch 2009 9.02.4 on Thursday; this will fix a few small bugs.
- See this blog post for more details on MDC back-end work.
- Continuing to work on reorganizing the interface reference documentation.
- Stuff we need from others
- Sheppy has a guide up to describe what you need to do if you want to get something documented. If you’re working on web-developer facing features or XUL-facing features please read it.
- Backend stuff for MDC. Sheppy is the main contact for MDC right now, if you have items that you need for MDC please talk to him. He can drive changes with Mindtouch as well as do stuff on his own as well.
- Silvia Pfeiffer is experimenting with standards for subtitling and captions with a focus on accessibility. If you care about this stuff, please have a look at her post or the demo that she put together.
Labs
- Labs is doing an On-Site this week.
- 0.5 has been released! It is a major performance upgrade and up to 33x faster on some platforms.
- The Weave team is sprinting on performance this week; we are especially interested in improving performance on netbooks, so if you have a netbook please talk to Thunder (thunder@mozilla.com) about helping with Weave performance testing.
Developer Tools
No updates this week
Add-ons
- 5.0.8 launches this week
- 5.0.9
- Bandwagon Phase II
- Contributions updates aimed at making Contributions more visible without bad surprises
- Jetpack Gallery
- AMO and Fennec
- Wiki created to track changes
Webdev
L10n
The l10n-drivers team is meeting in Berlin together this week. We are covering several topics and working on many projects.
Web
Pascal has guided twenty-six locales to completion of the Billion Download campaign, with four more possibly coming. He is still working on fixing some bugs in the site, but overall, the campaign was a success from an l10n perspective, considering the very narrow time frame. One more may come in soon.
Tools
Jeremy and Axel are working on l20n hacking this week, exposing some interesting challenges with JSON format for the code. More to come later in Jeremy Hiatt’s blog posts.
Gandalf and Fred Wenzel are working on relaunching Verbatim this week with AMO and SUMO support, and then adding HTML support. Localizers will now have a Mozilla implementation of the Pootle software to help localizers translate the various projects
Stas is overhauling the l10n documentation and working on a productization dashboard.
Foundation Updates
Roundtable
First round of interns brownbags will start tomorrow at 3pm PST.
We’re going to have about 3-4 interns presenting each time, and the full schedule can be found here:
https://intranet.mozilla.org/2009Interns#Interns_Brownbags
Everything will be public!
Intern Show & Tell
This week we have the following interns presenting:
Other Business
