WeeklyUpdates/2009-08-03

« previous week | index | next week »

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."

Development Updates

Firefox

Firefox Front End Work

Namoroka

Team News

Gecko

• Wrapping up remaining blockers for 1.9.2 alpha freeze.
• Turned on chrome JIT today.
• 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 has can be an security improvement (unhandled malloc() failures can be exploitable, etc)

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

IT

• 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

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 (transitioning to TB team)
• First run of automated software update tests on OS X for 3.0.13 and 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
  • Codecoverage numbers can be found here: C and C++, JS. We will be digging into these numbers with the Content team on Wednesday at 3pm PDT and the JS team, probably Thursday. A discussion with the Firefox team will be scheduled shortly. Let us know if others want to go through thee number with us.
  • Created Incoming / Outgoing Blocking bugs plots for Firefox are also available. See: all bugs considered for blocking (-/?/+) and all noms/blocking bugs (?/+). All branches
  • See blog posts: here and here.

Test Development

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

• Firefox hits 1 Billion download mark! More than 80 original articles, highlights include TechCrunch, the BBC, InformationWeek, CNET, LA Times, Ars Technica, ReadWriteWeb
• Personas in popular German consumer publication
• SSL certificates attacks at BlackHat and DefCon in the AP, ZDNet

Mozilla Service Week

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

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.

Developer Tools

No updates this week

Add-ons

• 5.0.8 launches this week
  • New profile pages
  • Phase 1 of Add-on Validator Tool
  • numerous bug fixes
• 5.0.9
  • Bandwagon Phase II
  • Contributions updates
• Jetpack Gallery
  • HTML mocks ready

Webdev

• AMO 5.0.8 code freeze is today
• Mozilla Creative Collective is almost in code freeze, QA starts this week with a launch in the next couple of weeks. See what it looks like.
• SUMO 1.2.1 maintenance release went out on Thursday

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

• Mark has been posting about how to encourage large numbers of people to participate on making the web more open and is looking for feedback
• The www.mozilla.org staging site is ready for testing and we're planning to go live with the new site by August 15.

Roundtable

Intern Show & Tell

This week we have the following interns presenting:

• Justin Lebar (:jlebar) Demo at http://people.mozilla.com/~jlebar/pushstate.html
• Roy Frostig (:froystig)