Firefox/Planning/2012-06-13

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Finch 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

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Kilimanjaro

• Sheila gathering a big triage together, more updates as events warrant

Firefox Desktop

No voice updates today, in a conflicting meeting. -akeybl

Release (13, 10esr)

• We are spinning a FF13.0.1 release today, for likely release Friday.
• We are in our second week of the cycle – Firefox 14 Beta 7 will be shipping this week
• The FF13 post-mortem will be held next Tuesday at 9AM PT

Beta (14)

• Please continue to prioritize tracked FF14 bugs over tracked FF15 bugs over work landing on m-c

Aurora (15)

• There are still plans to re-enable bg updates on Aurora in the next couple of weeks, will keep everybody updated.

Nightly (16)

Firefox Mobile

Beta (14)

• We expect Beta 7 to be released today or tomorrow, after a re-spin

Aurora (15)

Nightly (16)

• Features like Tablet UI, Tabs List, Reading Mode and Webapp Support are landing and will cause some disruption. This is expected. Please file bugs as you find them.

Friends of Mobile

Shout out to xmixahlx for keeping the Firefox on Android ARMv6 builds going. Read more about the ongoing work and feedback from users here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1643785 (14 pages)

Services

Firefox Sync

• Desktop/Mobile has a sexy new feature that landed in Nightly, pushing tabs to other Firefoxes. see read more about it here

Apps In the Cloud Server

Add-on SDK

Release (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• Doing well

Stabilization (1.8 -> Firefox 13, 14)

• Released 1.8RC1 yesterday
• On track to release June 26th, 2012

Development (1.9 -> Firefox 14, 15)

• On track to merge to stabilization June 26th, 2012
• Alex Poirot has written a jetpack-repacker to get dependencies, check xpi against official md5sums, unpack and repack SDK addons. (Need this file in same folder in order to work.)

• • given a xpi, it gives you the list of modules it uses
  • unpack an add-on to source code, and repack
  • checks md5 sums, so we can figure out whether it’s using a patched version of the SDK

Identity

• Native BrowserID/Persona support for signing into websites working patch (with NSS crypto)
• Patches will be up for review soon

Apps

• Firefox Desktop 15 (Aurora)
  • Landed: Support of native installation and and chromeless launch of apps for Win and Mac OS

• Firefox Desktop 16 (Nightly)
  • Fit and polish for K9o requirements

• Firefox Mobile 16 (Nightly) – in progress
  • Features: Native Install and chromeless window launch
  • Proposed marketplace bundling with Fennec is an open issue. See bug 738545
  • Starting to land some features

• Apps in the Cloud
  • AITC client for desktop landed for FF15

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Issues

Flash crash/won’t load: We are seeing a decrease in reports since the RealPlayer blocklist. We’ve updated our documentation accordingly. [1] [2]
[3]

Hotmail inbox/loading:
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]

Yahoo forced to sign in over and over:
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]

SPDY Issues:
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]

Thumbnails are blank: Possibly just a user education issue
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]

Features

New Tab: Generally unfavorable due in part to user education as displayed here “I submitted sad feedback because I want blank page when opening new tab. Should have read help first. Past history now turned off now very happy thanks Firefox”

Bad: 76%
[23]
[24]
[25]

Love it: 10%

• Hey, Your new view with the tabs, I love it! I switched to Safari b/c of this, but now I’m back! Great change!
• Love the new tab setup!!! Smart/great thinken
• the new tab feature is GREAT
• Firefox just updated and when I went to open a new tab I saw the new feature where the sites I visit frequently are displayed on the screen as an option to be selected from. What a great idea it is to include this. Thanks.

Improvements: 10%
“Can we make the new tab interface more configurable? I want the option to load my home page when opening a new tab. Or I want to be able to choose what sites display more easily. Maybe an “Add to tab page” option on bookmarks?”

Home page: Generally unfavorable. Lots of confusing with new tab page.

Bad:
[26]
[27]

Love it:

• i liked the ‘download’ in the new home page, so i must not go to ‘tools’ first 🙂
• the new homepage layout is sleek and easy to get to settings and addons
• I liked the new tab 😀 and the new “about:home” page !! Keep it up with your fire firefox !! 😀 😀

Mobile

(Just read the wiki today please)

Top three dissatisfiers (startup speed, memory consumption, Flash support) are fixed in Firefox Beta! Beta is a 4-star product in Google Play, with Beta6 getting 43 five-star written reviews.

Themes: “better than Chrome beta” “makes my work much easier” “downloading is very stable” “love the way it syncs tabs a bookmarks with my laptop”

Low reviews themes: text selection & copy/paste; google search looks old (work is in-progress to fix both)

We have blocked tablets, so we saw a couple of questions on SUMO about that (we improved documentation to fix)

We also updated documentation to address the prerequisite uninstallation of sync’ed aurora/beta/nightly before syncing the final release version.

User requests: import bookmarks from another mobile browser

UX & User Research

Design

• [web RTC] spinning work back up on RTC –0.1 level mockup here (Boriss)
• [Android] (Ian) –
  • Try the nightly and don’t freak out! reading mode, tabs tray, custom menu, and more! (all WIP)
  • Starting to dig into UX implications of being on ARMv6 phones
  • Ian’s notes from mobile dev meeting
    • Tab UI refinement on tablets and phones
    • Reader Mode – locking down designs
    • Working through Reading List designs
    • UX for Bookmarks History import
    • Awesomebar refresh implementation
    • Designs for tablet Start Page coming soon
    • Addressing some questions that are popping up around the new orange selection colour, and custom overflow menu design
• [Metro] (Yuan)
  • Front end dev kick-off on Tuesday
  • iterating on metro “snapped view”
  • finishing video sketch for basic browsing
• [Desktop]
  • UI reviewing and prototyping In-Browser Translation (Yuan, with Frank and Jonathan)
  • Continuing to check Australis designs against new heat map usage data (Zhenshuo)
  • Interaction work on the Australis customization panel (Zhenshuo, Stephen)
    • customization etherpad

Mobile

Summary below, update here and in your inbox.

• Activation rate for Android devices reached 900 000 units / day

• iOS6 has been announced, features Siri enhancements, Facebook integration, optimizations for the Chinese market

• Opera partnered with VimpelCom

• Tablet owners in the US are 3 times as likely to watch video as smartphone users

• Android and iOS users to be consuming on average more than 2 or 3 times the amount of data per month than Windows, Symbian or Blackberry users

• Rumoured Google Nexus 7-inch tablet to feature Tegra 3 CPU and 1 GB of RAM

• Leaked details of Windows Phone 8 to show Skype and RCS integration

• Samsung joined the Board of the Linux Foundation

• Telefonica and Vodafone to build joint venture in Great Britain

• China Telecom to be expanding in Europe to target 2 million Chinese expats

• Samsung launched TecTiles, consumer programmable NFC tags

Research

Welcome new Senior User Researcher, Lindsay Kenzig! She will work on ID and Firefox.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Adobe

• Adobe released a number of security updates for the Flash Player. A sandboxed plugin for Firefox was also included.

Android

• An interesting piece of news from Intel says that most of the versions of Android out there make little to no use of the second cores on many dual-core mobile devices.

Apple

• At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference this week, Apple presented some of the recent changes to the Safari web browser, some of which had already been seen in OS X Mountain Lion preview builds. The updated browser will feature a unified search and address bar, synced tabs via iCloud, a new “Tab View” interface, Baidu as the standard search engine in China and “the fastest Javascript interpreter on the market”

Facebook / Social Networks

• Facebook launched App Center, a personalized dashboard that “aims to improve app discovery across the web and mobile devices”. More than 600 social apps were included. At the launch, Facebook said that they had more than 130 games with one million users or more, and that they drove people to the Apple App Store 83 million times last month.
• Interestingly, in the App Center, only randomly-sampled users will be able to provide app ratings, in an effort to reduce the impact of manipulation.
• Samsung indicated that they were planning to launch a Facebook competitor

Google

• The Chrome team, in their dev channel, released the first build of Chrome for Windows 8. Here are some screenshots
• Google’s Chrome Web Store is now available in Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. There have also been some improvements in the analytics available to developers.
• Also in the Chrome Web Store is an improved PageSpeed Insights tool, an extension that analyzes all aspects of the page load, including resources, network, DOM, and the timeline.
• Perhaps because of the increasing availability of “retina” displays, Chrome Canary builds now support the CSS image-resolution property.
• Chrome 20 will now feature a timer with microsecond precision, allowing much more accurate timing for profiling.

Microsoft

• Microsoft stated that the upcoming release of MSIE10 will support unprefixed versions of CSS gradients, animations, transitions, transforms, font-feature-settings, the indexed database API and requestAnimationFrame. A number of other properties will also be supported in prefixed form.
• “Pinned sites” in Windows 8 can now sport a 144×144 pixel tile image and custom colours if the site author includes some custom meta tags in their HTML.

Opera

• The Opera team produced a long list of all the properties in the upcoming version 12 release of Opera that will support animation.

Security

• The Chrome team also released a breakdown of a second security breach that was revealed by Google’s Pwnium contest earlier this year. This one made use of some XSS vulnerabilities in Chrome’s URL handling.
• Yesterday was Patch Tuesday and Microsoft released fixes for 26 vulnerabilities, including one zero-day Internet Explorer bug that affects all versions, even MSIE10.

Tizen

• Samsung has spent the $500,000 necessary to join the Linux Foundation as a platinum member

W3C

• The CSS WG just resolved during its weekly conf call to allow browsers vendors to unprefix CSS 3 Transforms, Transitions and Animations immediately.
• Tim Bray has submitted a proposal for a new 451 status code to indicate when material is unavailable for legal reasons, for example state censorship.

WebKit

• Support for CSS Variables landed in WebKit.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Marketing

Press

• Firefox 14 Beta Arrives with an Extra Shot of Security
• Firefox 14 Beta promises improved security
• Firefox 15 Aurora has native PDF support
• Which Firefox is right for you — 13, 14, 15 or 16?

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2012-06-06

« previous week | index | next week »

Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Finch 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

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Kilimanjaro

Firefox Desktop

Release (13, 10esr, 3.6)

• FF13 released yesterday! Full unthrottling will wait till after Patch Tuesday next week.
• We pulled the final lever for moving insecure 3.6 users up to mainline – note the strike-out in the title

Beta (14)

• FF14b6 will be released tomorrow (6/7)

Aurora (15)

• Aurora 15 updates will be enabled Friday

Nightly (16)

• A big thanks to Marco Castelluccio for implementing a Web Apps Runtime and native install for Web apps for desktop Linux. With Marco’s contribution, we will be able to support native web apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux for Kilimanjaro and beyond.
  • Bug 745018 – Implement webapp runtime for Linux
  • Bug 744193 – Install web app on host OS – Linux
• PDF.js is making great progress
  • Bug 752676 – Control pdf.js and Other PDF Plugins using Application Preferences
  • Bug 742099 – Localize pdf.js strings and replace with the final strings for release
• Bug 749628 – Implement a “Responsive Design” tool
• Bug 758812 – Break up browser.js into smaller pieces, Phase 1
• Bug 735099 – Re-enable incremental GC on desktop platforms

Firefox Mobile

Beta (14)

• Prepping Beta 6, XF for tablets and FN for phones

Aurora (15)

• Tablet UI
• Reading List
• Find in Page

Nightly (16)

• Search Suggestions
• Chromeless WebApps
• Text Selection in Web Content

Services

Firefox Sync

• nothing major to report
• Native Sync is fleshing out ui parity (on Nightly)

Apps In the Cloud Server

• nothing major to report

Add-on SDK

Released 1.8b4!

No other updates this week due to Add-ons mini-workweek

Identity

• Work is progressing, drop by #identity or ping Ben A. for a demo of a (working!) Firefox-native sign in email chooser
• On track for 16

Apps

• Firefox Desktop 14 (Beta) – landed
  • Functionality was backed out – bug 750936
  • Native Install
  • Chromeless launch of apps

• Firefox Desktop 15 (Aurora)
  • Features: Support of native installation and and chromeless launch of apps for Win and Mac OS

• Firefox Desktop 16 (Nightly)
  • Fit and polish for K9o requirements

• Firefox Mobile 15 (Nightly) – in progress
  • Features: Native Install and chromeless window launch
  • Proposed marketplace bundling with Fennec is an open issue. See bug 738545

• Apps in the Cloud
  • AITC client for desktop landed for FF15

Developer Tools/Experience

• Firefox 15 (Aurora)
  • Debugger
    • includes remote debugging for Fennec
    • need to watch Aurora feedback closely
  • Responsive Mode
    • Mentioned last month, preffed on last week
    • Test responsive layouts without resizing your whole browser
  • Layout view
    • Added to Style Inspector
    • Shows at-a-glance metrics like height, width, padding for the selected element
  • Developer toolbar will be on the next train.
• End-to-end Apps tutorial draft
  • there’s a draft on MDN
  • this content will be presented directly on the Marketplace site
• Prototype of Open Web Apps Bootstrap up

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Firefox 13: Generally OK feedback so far, comments mainly around new features. Most of the negative comments could be addressed through user education.

Issues

We are seeing a 3% decrease in issues for 13 compared to the first two days of Firefox 12. Currently we are seeing reports of the following:

• SPDY cannot connect to Gmail on XP SP3 issue [1] UPDATE: Ticket filed [2]
• Avast claims FF 13 update is suspicious [3]
• Possibly something with hotmail/messenger (Can’t change status, can’t log in, can’t read messages — lots of pt-BR messages)
• Slower than previous versions [4]
• Memory consumption [5]

New tab page (probably about 60% negative): [6]:

• Want home page [7] [8] [9]
• Want google [10]
• Don’t know how to disable [11]
• Don’t know how to manage links [12]
• Think it is a privacy issue [13] – about 40-50% of negative feedback about this feature.

Tabs on demand:

• Don’t know how to disable [14]

Home page (about 80% negative):

• Almost universally hated because some people (a number of people) seem to have lost their previous home pages. Also, can’t set “blank” as a home page.
• Reset the home page [15]
• Unable to change homepage [16]
• Don’t like the new buttons [17]
• Users can’t change the search engine on this page.
• Some users are ending up with Yahoo as a home page without their consent.

Praise

New Tab Page [18]:

• Dear Firefox, I absolutely adore the history thumbnails that appear now whenever I open a new browser or a new tab. Thanks!!
• I really love the new tab feature added with your latest update!
• The new tab page makes it much easier to get to your favorite websites.

Homepage [19]:

• Awesome mozilla firefox 13 with new features off home page.A lot of improvements.Good job by your team.
• Buttons on the bottom of the homepage- handy

Smooth scrolling [20]:

• Smooth scrolling !!! FINALLY !
• Nice and smoth scroll option.. sss ..
• Smooth scrolling looks very good and faster. thanks!

Mobile

Firefox Beta for Android fixed the top three user issues with the product (start-up performance, browsing performance and flash support).

Overall for beta4/5 feedback is good; 4 stars.

Beta4/5 user issues:

• Photon 4g continues to generate low reviews
• A couple of instability reports and a couple of website incompatibility reports (techcrunch)

Beta 4/5 requests:

• Text selection
• Fewer permissions

Documentation:

• Completing documentation of single sync client requirement for beta/aurora/nightly users before installing release
• Updating supported devices documentation
• Need to update language support documentation
• Need to clarify tablet support and compatibility

UX & User Research

UX Design

• UX summit last week, so we were quiet
• [hometab/newtab] new mockups getting finished for some lightweight prototyping (Boriss)
• [android] (ibarlow)
  • final bug work for Native UI release (so soon!)
  • tablet and next-version-of-phone implementation and design support going on in
    • bug 739355 – Title bar updates (tablet and phones)
    • bug 739364 – Awesomebar updates (tablet and phones)
    • bug 739407 – Tab menu updates (tablet and phones)
    • bug 713450 – Close tabs by slide
  • Oh look! First traces of search suggest designs landing screenshot in flickr
• [sync setup] 90% use case flow revisions (Zhenshuo)
• [Identity] Ongoing design of Sign-into-site flows – variant 1, variant 2 (Zhenshuo)
• [apps integration] Design of app recommendations ongoing (Boriss, with special guest Bryan)
• [desktop]
  • Reviewing Australis designs against new Firefox heatmap data (Zhenshuo)
  • Detailed interaction design iterations happening on Australis customization UI; basic clickable mockup (Zhenshuo, Stephen)
  • Design in progress for layout of in-content preferences: mockup (Zhenshuo)
• [metro] (Yuan)
  • User feedback on button styling for metro app bar — user test materials
  • Another video sketch, this one about general web browsing use, in preparation
  • Exploring share functions, through app contract

Research

UR ran some usability tests on the Firefox Beta. We found that basic tasks (search, bookmarking, tabs) were easy for participants to complete. There are some questions around the search accelerators in the Top Sites tab, and of course typing is still painful. UR will work with UX to figure out how to manage. Anyone who wants to see raw video footage of the tests can contact Mary Trombley.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Apple

• Apple was granted 22 patents covering everything from industrial design to a futuristic 3D Apple TV remote and even a way that Apple envisions of harnessing power through electromagnetic induction to help extend battery life on iOS devices.

Microsoft

• The 6th Platform Preview for IE10 now includes the latest preview update for IE10. It includes an embedded Adobe Flash Player, which has been improved to support touch gestures. It is also integrated with the Process Lifetime Manager to better improve battery life in the Metro environment. Flash will also be bundled with the operating system and will receive improvements through Windows Update.
• The new release preview also sends a Do Not Track header by default, the first web browser to do so.
• IE10 now supports unprefixed versions of CSS transitions, transforms, animations, gradients, and CSS Fonts’ font-feature-settings property, as well as platform APIs such as the Indexed Database API (IndexedDB) and requestAnimationFrame().
• IE10 will also no longer support IE4’s visual filters and transitions for anything other than intranet sites
• Interesting, Microsoft is going to great lengths to force adoption of the Metro-style interface, even to the point of removing all code from Windows 8 referencing the Start button/menu to prevent third-party developers from creating a workaround allowing people to continue using it
• Microsoft’s Bing Mobile team released On-Ex, an Android application that is a sort of “if this then that” for mobile phones. Powered by Javascript, it offers some interesting API calls — modeOfTransport returns whether the user is walking, running or driving.
• Analysts are estimating that new Windows RT tablets will be in the $500-$700 price range, which raises concerns for their viability

Google

• Fully hardware-accelerated CSS filters are available in Chrome/Chromium version 19 and newer
• The press are heralding the upcoming Chrome version 21 as being optimized for web-based gaming

Security

• Facebook is trying to stop a browser plugin-based worm that uses the Crossrider cross-platform plugin creation tool.

Tizen

• A Tizen developer ran the RingMark test on Tizen, Android, and iPhone smartphones. Tizen was the clear leader with 141 passed Ring 1 tests.

Gaming

• The authors of Scirra, an HTML5 gaming framework, did an HTML5 desktop/mobile gaming shootout using 23 different combinations of browsers and devices. Firefox got the highest score for desktop but the lowest for Android 4.0.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Opera announced it reached 189.6 million mobile users, a new version of Opera Mini for basic phones and a partnership with America Movil and one with Bharti Airtel

• 65% of all Androids run Gingerbread, 19% Froyo and 7% Ice Cream Sandwich

• The hardware section of the Play Store expansing with accessories

• Researchers found security flaws in Google Bouncer

• HTC and Sony partnered to augment their mobile offerings

• First Android device on x86 architecture available in Europe

• Samsung Galaxy S III landing in market, Galaxy Note 2 rumoured to launch in October

• Asus, Acer and Toshiba to be among Windows 8 tablet manufacturers

• Video of Tizen on Samsung reference device available

• By 2015 smartphones will account for 75% of new phones sold

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Marketing

• Finalizing materials for releases later this week; getting started on the next round of releases.
• LMesa and GJimenez finishing handoff to LForrest; LForrest to take lead in earnest next week.

Press

• Six Good Reasons to Download Firefox 13
• Firefox 13: A Faster, Smarter Web Browser
• Firefox 13 Releases A Day Before Official Launch
• Firefox 13 Arrives with Snazzy Features that Rival Chrome

Questions, Comments, FYI

• If you see :gps, give him a giant hug, or a beer.

Actions this week