WeeklyUpdates/2008-09-22

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Meeting Details

• 1:00pm Pacific time (20:00 UTC until November 2, 2008)
• Mozilla HQ, 1st floor conference table
• +1 650 903 0800 x91 Conf# 8600 (US/International)
• +1 416 848 3114 x91 Conf# 8600 (Canada)
• +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8600 (US Toll Free)
• join irc.mozilla.org #staffmeeting for backchannel

note: all participants are muted automatically; if you want to talk, press *1 to un-mute yourself

WeeklyUpdate Live

You can watch the weekly meetings live at Air Mozilla You can also view previous meetings from the "on-demand" button on the Air Mozilla player. Meetings will be posted for on-demand consumption shortly after the meeting conclusion.

Friends of the Tree

I'd like to nominate, for Friend of the Tree, LouCypher, also known as Zoocar9, who joined Spread Firefox on September 2004 and has been involved on various Firefox related project since, including buttons/banners for promoting Firefox (resulting in nearly 100,000 downloads,) Firefox Materials (a collection of links for Firefox promotion materials), search plugins, extensions, user scripts for Greasemonkey extension, user styles for Stylish extension, scripts for userChrome.js extension, custom buttons for Custom Buttons extension, and now FoxieWire.

Join me in celebrating LouCypher's 4 years of Spread Firefox ass-kicking.

Please send FotT nominations to asa@mozilla.org. This is a great opportunity for the community to recognize those who go above and beyond, so please tell me when you see that happening. Thanks.

Development Updates

/ Fx 2.0.0.17 / Fx 3.0.2

Firefox 2.0.0.17 / 3.0.2

• regressions were found during the beta period
• quickly fixed, testday found no additional issues
• betas reissued last Friday
• expect to ship these releases Tuesday, Sept 23rd

Thunderbird 2.0.0.17

• in beta now.
• ships on Thursday, Sept 25th.

Gecko 1.9.1

• Check out the Way Cool Work going into Gecko 1.9.1.
• See freeze dates below in Firefox 3.1 section.
• Interesting queries related to Gecko 1.9.1
• 35 1.9.1 blockers.
• 195 wanted bugs (also up)
  • 21 P1s. These are bugs we feel would really, really make a good release if we had a solid handful completed.
  • 53 P2s. These are medium complexity bugs/changes that are nice to have.
  • 42 P3s. The lowest priority bugs for this release. These are the ones that we will definitely take, but the others take priority.

Firefox 3.1

• approximately 10,000 users on nightlies
• another 10,000 or more on 3.1 Alpha 2
• currently evaluating content for revised schedule
• Beta 1 Schedule
  • en-US string freeze is Thursday, Sept 26th at 11:59pm PDT
  • code freeze is Tuesday, Sept 30th at 11:59pm PDT
• Beta 2 Schedule
  • en-US string freeze is Thursday, October 30th at 11:59pm PDT
  • code freeze is Tuesday, November 4th at 11:59pm PDT

TB 3

• 3.0b1 code freeze happening tomorrow
• expect more feature changes after b1

Mobile

• Release of M8 this week
• List of bugs remaining for A1.
• If you have a N8x0 device, we welcome you to test out Fennec and file bugs.

IT

• Continued CDN Trials
  • Tested addons.mozilla.org behind CDNetworks bug 450745
• Thursday Scheduled Maintenance
  • Wrap up kernel upgrades Thursday
  • Netscaler OS upgrade (San Jose, Amsterdam, Beijing)
• Rescheduled - Upcoming Hg/SVN/CVS downtime blog post

Release Engineering

• changeset info now reported on tinderbox for talos runs, should make tracking down regressions easier.
• downtime for unittest switchover tomorrow morning, see Lukas's post to dev.planning.
• Tues/tomorrow: FF3.0.2 and FF2.0.0.17
  • did a *very* fast turnaround on FF3.0.2build#6 late last week.
• Thurs: TB2.0.0.17
• half-way to end of our post-FF3 Firefox2 support, see blog post and post to dev.planning

QA

Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 - Completed Smoketests, BFTs, l10n, and update testing [abillings, juanb]

Firefox 3.0.x

• Released 3.0.2 RC6 to beta. Completed smoke tests, update testing, bug verifications, and live checks. [tomcat, tchung, marcoz, marcia, others]
• Extensive Investigation of the Norton 360 issue. See bug 452469

Firefox 3.1

• Feature testing:
  • Completed first draft of the Private Browsing test plan. Ran the latest tryserver build [marcia]
  • Worked on CSS Transforms, ran into several bugs: bug 455138, bug 455445 [ctalbert]
• More testing with JAWS 10.0 public beta. Verified that some of the bugs reported to us by Freedom Scientific and mutual user base are indeed fixed in 3.1. Most of these also in 3.0.2. [marcoz]
• Filed a number of Tracemonkey bugs: bug 455773, bug 451843

Mobile

• Joel is ramping up on trouble shooting the failing mochitests
• QA filing bugs like crazy.

Test Dev

• Gristmill
  • Found out that the approach for looking up anaomous elements won't work. Adam and Mikeal came up with a new lookup proposal. Finished initial implementation of the Lookup object. Still need to do inspector work and testing.
  • Finished the initial MozMill framework event system. Added listeners for the existing UI to display new framework messages. [mikeal]
• Working on setting up the Standalone Talos for Pageloader Tests with Extensions installed [tomcat]
• Improved the bisect.sh script for finding regressions and fixes for JavaScript Tests [bc]

Community

• We held a Dev Day at Seneca College on Sept 15-16. Key leaders of this were Dave Humphrey, Mark Finkle, Clint Talbert. Videos of all the sessions will be made available via the Seneca website and hopefully on DevMO.
• There was a Firefox 3.0.2 Test Day on Friday. See results
• Held a Firefox/WebVisum/general MoFo talk at the Blinden- und Sehbehindertenverein Hamburg e.V., which is the local blindness self-help organization. Well-received with a lot of good questions and excitement.
• Prepared a presentation that I'll hold at the Best Of Accessibility Symposium on Thursday September 25. First presentation will be for newcomers to screen reader technology showing how web 2.0 pages like Twitter interact with a screen reader. Second will be on WAI-ARIA, demonstrating simple page enhancements that greatly improve accessibility.

Security

• 3.02 is scheduled to ship tomorrow
• Window spoke at IT Security World on Monday and Executive Women's Forum on Wednesday last week
• Security Reviews continue
• Looking for ways to reduce the security bug backlog

Marketing/PR

Consumer Research

PR

• A lot of discussion in the press around EULAs
• A few more EULA articles over the weekend
• Articles about Mozilla's plans for 3.1 and private browsing mode
• Mike Beltzner interviewed for GCN article about browsers
• Mitchell profiled in Mother Jones magazine
• Brendan Eich on browser panel at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC
• Confusion about Mozilla's mobile timeline
• Mike Shaver interviewed for San Jose Mercury News article about Chrome's unique identifier
• Introducing: Above the Fold - Mozilla in the news

Events

• Browser Redesign Series at University Michigan: Labs is working with School of Information Students to host a brainstorm session on how to improve Firefox on September 25th.
• Events Triage call: Please join us for our bi-weekly events triage call Wednesday at 10 a.m. PDT. Dial-in is 650-903-0800, ext 91, id 248 or 800-707-2533, password 369, ext 91, id 248 and #events on irc.mozilla.org.

Retention Marketing

• Impact Mozilla, an upcoming marketing contest with the goal of addressing our retention marketing challenge, is set to launch next Monday. Expect to soon see a micro site and a blog post announcing the launch. Thanks to John Slater, Seth Bindernagel, Laura Mesa, and Nobox for their help here. Lastly, please let us know if you're aware of any student groups who would be interested in participating.

Creative/Brand

• The Firefox logo style guide (beta) is on schedule to launch later this week. Please see John or Tara with any questions.

Support

• Feedback from French localizers Delphine Lebédel and Vanessa Yve about the localization process on SUMO [1]. Highlights:
  • Difficult to get an overview of e.g. which articles need translation, or which edits need review.
  • Complicated UI -- unclear what certain icons and options mean, or how things work
  • Site is slow
• Next step: talk to other localizers to gather more feedback, and work on fixing the issues

Metrics

• No updates

Evangelism

Presentations Library

Morphing the "Evangelism Library" into a "Presentations Library" where folks will be able to upload their slide decks and post whatever other resources related to that presentation are available - summary paragraph, speakers notes, links to or full video/audio recordings, etc. The idea would be to have a central location for these resources (Mozilla people do a lot of talks, it turns out) so they can be reused, remixed, localized, and re-shared.

The wiki currently lives here http://library.mozilla.org. If you'd like to help out with (or have questions about) this project, send email to Deb (deb-at-mozilla-com).

• 3.0.2 rapid response team gearing up (Asa)
• Upgraded Deki for devmo (Sheppy)

Mozilla Labs

• Labs Meet-up in Mtn. View. Thursday 9,25, 6-9pm. Pizza, hacking, conversation.
• Making a push for Ubiquity on Thunderbird, if there are any expert, please contact us and we welcome your advice

Webdev, Add-ons, AMO

• AMO
  • AMO 4.0.1 was launched successfully last week
  • AMO 4.0.2 opens today
  • AMO statistics were borked after an IP change for the slave database last week bug 455628 -- fix was implemented in bug 452290
• Socorro
  • Project update last week
  • Database server migrated this weekend, waiting for full vacuum to finish
  • Project documentation was updated last week thanks to Lars
  • This week -- finish migration and repair summary tables (topcrasher page)
• SUMO
  • Pushed 0.6.4 out last Tuesday
  • 0.7 code freeze this week
• Headrush
  • Working on style changes
  • Aiming to do a quiet release before end Q3
• Graph Server
  • Architecture brainstorm & meeting last week
    • Perfomatic:Rearchitecture
    • Focused on performance, adding customization features and detecting regressions.
    • Will start work on re-architecture in Q4
• Labs forums were migrated off of SMF onto Vanilla

L10n

• Thunderbird Dashboard - Gozer (on IRC) set up the TB dashboard for now, triggering builds manually.

• Pike landed JarMaker.py, which lays the groundwork for l10n-merge and other improvements in the l10n build ecosystem. (Questions about L10n-merge? Email sethb.)

• Firefox 3.1 update from last week's Firefox meeting.

Foundation Updates

Note: This is Mark Surman's first day as the new executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Please welcome Mark as he gets settled in to his Foundation work. He can be reached at mark -at- mozillafoundation -dot- org.

• Grants
  • The Mozilla Foundation made a $25K grant to Benetech to support development of a DAISY reader for Firefox.
  • The Mozilla Foundation is funding Silvia Pfeiffer to do a study of video accessibility issues for Firefox.
  • Max Kanat-Alexander posted the results of a Foundation-funded survey of Bugzilla users.
  • Ben Millard completed the intermediate milestone for his Foundation-funded project to study HTML accessibility usage patterns.

• Web site(s)
  • David continued www.mozilla.org archiving, redirect, and bug triage work.
  • David scheduled the next www.mozilla.org planning meeting for October 2 at 10 am Pacific.

• Other
  • David blogged about the new Mozilla T-shirt and updated the associated bug 385513.
  • Gerv got some changes to the public suffix list into Firefox 3.0.2.