Firefox/Planning/2012-05-30

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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

REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren't able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Add-on SDK

Release (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• Everything is looking good

Stabilization (1.8 -> Firefox 13, 14)

• Released Add-on SDK 1.8b3 yesterday

Development (1.9 -> Firefox 14, 15)

• We have three new proposals available for review and comment
  • Content Scripts: ability to share content script instances in different APIs contexts.
  • Disposables: a 'dispose' method for resource management
  • Collections: a common API for all collections to make code more maintainable and easy to grok.

Feedback Summary

Mobile

Top all-time dissatisfiers (performance and flash) are fixed in Firefox for Android beta. Five-star ratings continue to pour in; themes:

• Firefox reinvented Wow. I have to say that I'm really impressed with the speed. It is even faster than Opera in most cases. Good job Mozilla, looks like you have nailed it this time.;-)
• Jawdroppingly Fast Even on my 2 year old phone. I knew you would come through Mozilla.
• Mozilla got it right Fast, responsive, simple, and looks great.
• Remarkably stable for beta --FF is really fast and desktops load well. Like it better than built-in browser.

Issue to mitigate: as a prerequisite to pairing a device running FF14 android release, users must uninstall beta and aurora if they were syncing data.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Adobe

• Adobe released an updated version of Adobe Shadow, their mobile/desktop synchronized viewing and editing tool for mobile websites and web apps

Google

• Google Play now supports in-app subscription billing for applications
• The Chromium development team made further improvements to their Field Trials infrastructure (somewhat analogous to Firefox's Telemetry), and encouraged contributors to make use of them
• The Chrome Security Team posted a detailed summary of how "PinkiePie" managed to break out of the Chrome sandbox during the last Pwnium competition. A chain of six different bugs, including two in Native Client, were used. A total of 16 zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed during the contest
• Google released updated versions of the Chromebook and introduced the Chromebox. Potential customers in the United States and the UK will be able to try them out at selected retail stores, while enterprise customers will benefit from a number of new features, including cost-effective Windows virtualization. The new version of the Chromebook's UI, "Aura", also was made available to existing Chromebook users.
• Google has "a matter of weeks" to address four antitrust issues identified by European Union antitrust regulators.
• SPDY/3 is now available to 95% of Chrome users
• A Chrome developer posted a good introduction to the browser's initial implementation of Web Intents
• StatCounter, which measures browser share page view, not users, said that Chrome had now surpassed Microsoft Internet Explorer as the world's most popular browser.

Microsoft

• It appears that Adobe Flash will be permitted to run in the Metro version of MSIE10 on Windows 8

Motorola

• Google finally closed its $12.5b purchase of Motorola Mobility

Opera

• Rumours are swirling about a possible purchase of Opera Software by Facebook. Besides its desktop, mobile, and embedded browsers, Opera also serves ~30b mobile ads per month via its advertising networks, operates a mobile application store with 30,000 apps.

WebOS

• The HP team responsible for Enyo -- webOS's HTML5-based application framework that debuted on the TouchPad -- will be leaving the company and starting at Google shortly

Yahoo!

• Yahoo! launched Axis, what it describes as a new browser. Provided as a browser plugin for Firefox, Chrome and MSIE on desktops, it is a full wrapper around UIWebView on iOS. Media coverage has on the whole been positive. It offers a tighter integration between search, with thumbnails shown instead of search results.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Preparing final collateral for next week's releases.