WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-23

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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 )

Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka)

• 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:
  • P1: 3
  • P2: 20
  • P3: 0
  • Other: 14
• Team blocker numbers:
  • Layout: 3
  • Content: 6
  • GFX: 1
  • JS: 14

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.
    • RAI3 segment
    • Corriere della Sera piece
  • Hyderabad Party Recap:
    • Read all about it in the Indian Express.
    • Pictures from the party
• 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

• FF 3.6 Dashboard of green and red locales
• Fennec 1.0 Dashboard of green and red locales

Web stuff

• Firefox 3.6 First Run and What’s New pages
• Fennec web l10n

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.

Roundtable

WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-16

From MozillaWiki

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Friends of the Tree

Aakash wrote in, “I’d like to nominate Aleksej as a friend of the tree for his great work in our latest Testday on Fennec 1.0 Beta 5. He filed 2 bugs on the day and, more importantly, acted as our resident community Testday host by greeting every person that joined the channel and sparking conversation throughout the day.”

I can speak from experience that this kind of testing and coordination help is hugely valued and critical to the success of our community testing program and so I’m thrilled to second Aakash’s nomination. -Asa

Mary wrote in with a batch of FoTT nominations:

• Jeremy Glassenberg: For being an awesome contributor and the best Firefox ever. Not to mention break dancer! http://www.flickr.com/photos/badubadu/4093935644/in/set-72157622653568287/
• Bob Moss & Alexander Milewski: Huge thanks for all their hardwork capturing the SF party on film. Special thanks to Bob for lugging all his equipment and making hundreds of prints.
• Vineel Reddy: Congrats to Vineel for pulling off another wonderful Firefox party and for his continued creativity and dedication. His party in Hyderabad was picked up in the press: http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Internet+buffs+celebrate+Mozilla%92s+5th+anniversa&artid=7sqpRt0YVPI=&SectionID=xAV59odivTs=&MainSectionID=wIcBMLGbUJI=&SectionName=BUzPVSKuYv7MFxnS0yZ7ng==&SEO= Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/pindivineelreddy/5FirefoxAnniversary10D#
• Carlo Frinolli: Congratulations to Carlo and team for lighting up Rome with Firefox. Carlo and team pulled together an amazing integrated campaign (including website, twitter teasers and videos) and came up with some of the most iconic pictures for “Light the world with Firefox.” http://www.flickr.com/photos/nois3lab/sets/72157622640597827/

Development Updates

Firefox

( Projects | Status | Goals | People )

Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka)

• beta 3 refresh should be coming Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning
• beta 3 includes a components directory lockdown feature – johnath to blog about the details early this week
• code freeze for RC1 is scheduled for Wednesday but might be at risk; come to the Platform meeting tomorrow to discuss.

Firefox Future

• preliminary explorations on 3.7 work continue, see the projects page for more details.

Team News

Gecko

• News from the CrashKill front:
  • Today’s discussion will be about how to determine if 3.6 will crash less than 3.5.x and 3.0.x. The way we do our crash report throttling makes comparing releases difficult–we have to guess on about five different variables when comparing releases.
  • Reminder: We now have the ability to block specific DLLs from loading. For the list of DLLs we intend to block, see bug 525103.
• News from Electrolysis:
  • 4 blockers until out-of-process-plugins (OOPP) land in mozilla-central preffed off, hopefully this week… lots of small issues being found, but few major ones.
  • Firefox 3.7 to have OOPP enabled by default, Windows and Linux. There will be no multi-process tabs, nor mac support.
  • demo of Fennec with multi-process tabs available: beginning additional work to make it less hacky
• GFX:
  • Hardware-accelerated rendering has been on everyone’s mind.
    • The Layers API has been pretty much finalized, and Robert O’Callahan and Bas Schouten have been looking into what will be necessary to implement it. Please take a look and see if the Layers API fits your needs!
    • Bas Schouten continues to tear things up. His mostly-complete DirectWrite font backend, bug 517642 has been enhanced with a new Direct2D cairo backend, bug 527707. Direct2D will be our first mainstream hardware accelerated backend.
  • WOFF, the Web font format pioneered by Mozilla, has been a big hit. John Daggett and Jonathan Kew attended ATypI 2009 in Mexico City to talk about it and other font-related developments, and John has a blog post about their presentation.
  • Also on the subject of fonts: Jonathan Kew and Behdad Esfahbod have been working on Harfbuzz, an advanced OpenType font shaper. Most recently, they spent a week in Toronto sprinting on the library, which we’re going to use for more consistent and performant font shaping on all platforms. You can learn more in bug 449292 or in Behdad’s blog post.
  • Jeff Muizelaar has been working on creating a scrolling performance test suite which the Graphics team wants to use to measure and improve Gecko’s interactive scrolling performance. If you know of any sites that are slow to scroll, please tell us in bug 527728.
• Blockers:
  • P1: 4
  • P2: 50
  • P3: 0
  • Other: 28
• Team blocker numbers:
  • Layout: 7
  • Content: 8
  • GFX: 6
  • JS: 31

Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x

• Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6
  • slushy code freeze for both releases
  • still have a couple of patches to take
  • otherwise, on track for mid-December release

Thunderbird

• Working on 3.0 RC1, build 2 forthcoming shortly.

SeaMonkey

Mobile

IT

Last Week

• dev-vmware hardware upgrade
  • good for all the stage/dev VMs
• Bugzilla Update
  • It’s live!
  • Regressions tracked here.

This Week

• Planning for kernel updates Tuesday/Thursday

Release Engineering

• TALOS, TALOS, TALOS
  • talos for e10s
  • 4 new talos tests come online, go check out the results over on the graphserver:
    1. v8
    2. tsvg_opacity
    3. dirty+cold startup tests
    4. measuring x resources during linux tp4 runs
  • reminder: need to file bugs to get new tests added to Talos
• new Firefox major update offer 2.0.0.20->3.0.15: (bug 526409)
  • Fx2 users are 4,031,576 (4.27% of user base)
  • ready to go as soon as QA says so
• more n810s (40) and 30+ minis coming online

QA

Test Execution

• Shipped Fennec Beta 5. Test results here.
• Spotchecks for Fx3.6b3 today. ETA to ship to beta tuesday, 11/17
• Running Major Update test scenarios this week across all locales on the betatest channel. (2.0.0.20 -> 3.6b2 & 3.0.15 -> 3.6b2)
• Testing Weave Sync 1.0 beta this week
• Crashkill QA
  • Tabled out a nice wiki list of crashes that QA is investigating. There are now 44 open bugs that need resolutions for 1.9.2. We have our work cut out!
  • New bugs filed last week: (bug 528658, bug 528645, bug 528261, investigating with STR: bug 527543 (Thanks Marcia!)

Web Dev Testing

• Shipped AMO 5.3
• Tested/deployed new drop of MDC from Mindtouch
• Handed off the What’s New / First Run / Under the Hood pages to l10n
• Continued working through GetPersonas.com 2.0 bugs

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• David fixed the a11y top crasher bug 525579 on mozilla-central today! See this blog post by MarcoZ for more info. MarcoZ has verified that this fixes the bug, and David is preparing a patch for the Firefox 3.6 branch.
• Held a Fennec beta 5 testday last friday. Attendance has dipped below 30, but there was 7 bugs filed. Please pass the word out of future testdays! Next testday will be on Nov 20th, on L10n community testing.
• Created a Preliminary Task List within the QA COG to help determine current projects/tasks for kids to sign up for (Independent High School in San Jose)
• No November meetup, will resume in December

Test Development

• Created final design test-agent code for Orodurin, got Windows Mobile XPCShell tests running both normally and on the device with the new design
• Implemented changes to the crash automation project to help streamline the workflow
• Worked with RelEng to bring up preliminary Ts Test for Windows Mobile, got it running in the RelEng framework (Thanks Aki!)

Security

No Updates this week

Marketing/PR

PR

• Firefox 3.6 Beta 2: BetaNews, ChannelWeb, CIO Today, CNET

• Firefox for Maemo Beta 5: Download Squad, WirelessWeek
• Jetpack update and Gallery launch!
• On heels of 5 year anniversary, NetApp announces Firefox at 25% market share worldwide
• Mozilla Firefox featured in Redmond “2009 Reader’s Choice Awards” Best Non-Microsoft Browser

Five Years of Firefox

• Thank you everyone for your awesome hard work and creativity! We’re currently taking a look at metrics. But here is a quick glance:
  • Unique Visitors Nov 9-16: 461, 679
  • Unique Video Views Nov 9-16: 296,360
  • Now live in 31 languages (5 more added last week)
  • 2,519 new Twitter Followers and 12,375 new Facebook Fans
  • 5340 new email subscribers
  • Over 1,200 photos submitted. Please remember to get yours up on Flickr and tag with Firefox5. Enjoy the current pool!
  • 232 parties packs were sent. A list of parties can be found here.
• There is still time to participate in the 5 year Mozilla Creative Collective design challenge. Please get your submissions in by Dec. 9th!

General

• Please join us for the community marketing call this week on Wednesday, Nov. 18th at 10 a.m. PDT/18:00 UTC (note the time change)! Agenda will include a mobile update and a Firefox Five Year debrief. Please send Mary (mary at mozilla dot com) any other items
  • 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#. If you’re outside the US, use Skype to call in with our toll-free number.
  • You can also watch the meeting live in Open Video at air mozilla
  • For those that can’t make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).

Events

• Music Hack Day November 21-22, 200; Boston, MA.  We are sponsoring this event.
  
• 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).
  
• 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

No updates.

Metrics

• User Outreach
  • Published first set of findings from our current program (at mozilla.com). #1 comments from users? “Firefox is great”.
  • However, there were two significant problems identified by users – (1) Open video on the firstrun page freezes, and (2) Firefox won’t remember a user’s settings (e.g., saving their homepage). A fix for this should be in the next release of Fx!

Evangelism

• 4,874 survey results to our web developer survey – will start analyzing this week.
• New deki install in place – allows us to restart, now testing captchas to re-enable accounts.
• Paul Rouget has been busy. We’ll start posting stuff next mon + tue.

Labs

• The University Design Challenge has generated a lot of cool submissions about how to redesign the Firefox History interface.
• We’ve launched the Jetpack Gallery.
• We’ve started a Jetpack 50-lines-of-code challenge: Write the coolest Jetpack in 50 lines or less by December 13 to win a prize.
• Weave Sync 1.0 Beta has been released!

Developer Tools

• Bespin Embedded 0.5 “preview release” went out on Friday. See the announcement blog post.

Add-ons

• Download Source Tracking
• Self Hosted Add-ons
• Pledge Drives and Subscriptions
• Reviews are humming along
  • Need Seamonkey reviewers
• AMO 5.4
  • Enhanced Localization
  • GetSatisfaction for Add-ons
  • Release Channels
• Compatibility up to 49%
  • Add-on compatibility reporter emails going out this week
  • 2200 add-ons, 24,000 reports

Webdev

• AMO 3.5 launched – 100 bugs fixed! Included support for “listed” add-ons which means we don’t host them, just point to their home page. We also took image hosting out of the database (finally).
• Jetpack gallery site is up
• Socorro 1.1 launched Thursday (crash reporter update) – see dev.planning thread for change log. Socorro 1.2 underway with launch right before Thanksgiving.
• Plugins directory work continues – Les filed a tracking bug. We plan on releasing a plugin directory by end of Q4. See mockups to get an idea of what we’re aiming for.

L10n

Firefox

• Dashboard shows the current status
  • 62 participated
• Tracking bug for the What’s New and Getting Started pages

Fennec

• String freeze tomorrow, November 17
  • Fennec locales participating
• Web l10n underway

Infrastructure updates

• Verbatim going live soon!
  • Hope to have AMO, SUMO, and Get Personas hooked in for translation
  • Wenzel and Gandalf are experimenting with a website translation jetpack called Pontoon with Silme hooked in to track changes
• Pike and Gandalf continue their work with IT to take the localization sign-off website live

QA

• Working with a team called Multi-lingual QA to do some automated l10n testing for us.

Foundation Updates

• We’re getting a great response from the new Get Involved page and we’re looking for people from marketing, security, UI design and documentation to help us bring new people into the community. Contact david at mozillafoundation dot org if you’re interested.
• We published a progress report on the Mozilla Education program in 2009, along with a list of professors and schools involved in Mozilla Education activities.
• Bugzilla API 0.2 released. This is pretty much fully-functional; please build cool stuff with it to ease any Bugzilla-related pain you may have. After the bugzilla.mozilla.org upgrade at the weekend, it’s fully-functional against that server.

Roundtable