Firefox/Planning/2012-05-09

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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.

Actions from Last Week

• dcm to find updated states of sdk usage in new addons
  • In Add-on SDK Section!
• thunder/mconnor - update on identity+sync
• michelleluna - look at gmail feedback for aurora this week (doesn't reload); Answer: there is no input data to suggest a widepsread reloading Gmail issue in Firefox, I see only 6 comments out of 999 related to Gmail and none about not reloading, see input.mozilla.org/en-US/?product=firefox&version=14.0a2&date_start=2012-04-25&date_end=&q= A more generic search for 'google' also surfaces no comments about mail issues.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Kilimanjaro

Basecamp is the subset of Kilimanjaro that is critical for our B2G launch in Brazil. Kilimanjaro is still Kilimanjaro and work continues there. Once the Product leads have sorted out the critical subset, those bugs will be marked in Bugzilla. Basecamp is "must hit" 8/31 capabilities.

Firefox Desktop

Release (12, 10esr, 3.6)

• Automatic updates from 3.6 to 12 are proceeding in bug 753006 – Please prepare automatic updates for FF3.6 to FF12
  • 3.6.28->12 updates are already live

Beta (13)

• We've just built our third FF13 beta

Nightly (15)

• Owen Carpenter, John Rietveld, Devon Sayles, and Zuhao (Joe) Chen from Michigan State's CSE Capstone program landed in-content prefs (preffed off) and tests into m-c last night. To see this great work, set browser.preferences.inContent to true. Congratulations to that team. Thanks to Jared Wein for his mentoring and to Unfocused for his code reviews. See In-Content Preferences for Firefox may be here in 16 weeks for more.
• bug 650353 have one global object per compartment
• bug 752877 Cut wrappers after firing [inner,outer]-window-destroyed.
• bug 716439 Implement clipping to rectangles with rounded corners on the GPU
• bug 674225 support the Opus voice codec in <audio> and <video> elements
• bug 641892 Support showing multiple popup notification icons at the same time
• bug 743877 tab switching shouldn't occur off a timeout
• bug 664918 Infrastructure for media stream graph processing
• bug 650988 Do image scaling on the GPU
• bug 748785 Enable NPAPI Async drawing model by default on windows
• bug 166240 Implement D3E KeyboardEvent.location (except JOYSTICK)
• bug 478927 Need a way from chrome to know when error pages load
• bug 726366 spdy should support tunnel through http proxy
• bug 377624 Implement the accept attribute for the form and file upload controls form "image/*"

Firefox Mobile

Beta Plan

• Some new beta blockers appeared on Friday
  • Rendering failures on Motorolas
  • XUL -> Native migrations failures
• Investigating shipping multiple locales
• Imminent: Go to build
• 2012-05-15: Push to market

Aurora (14)

• Landing blockers

Nightly (15)

• New front-end work
  • Chromeless webapps
  • Tablet UI
  • Homescreen widget
  • Reader mode
  • Text selection
  • HTML5 context menu

Services

• read the wiki update

Firefox Sync

• Sync 2.0 & Sign into Browser have separated into two projects
  • ping :ally if you have questions about what this means
• Along with mobile, _this_ close to the fennec beta

Apps In the Cloud Server

• keeps on rocking in the free world

Add-on SDK

Release (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

% of all new add-ons uploaded to AMO that are built with Add-on SDK (these are rough numbers identified only by GUIDs beginning with "jid")

Jan 35.27%
Feb 29.2%
Mar 34.15%
Apr 30.34% 

Stabilization (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• Released 1.7RC2 yesterday - please test
• On track to release 15 May 2012 (next Tuesday!)

Development (1.8 -> Firefox 13, 14)

• On track to merge to Stabilization 15 May 2012
• Spring cleaning! We need add-on developers to give comments on a couple of issues on items we want to change. Much more detail on the add-ons blog.
• Memshrink goes on - and we have decisions to make on what to do about SDK-based add-ons on AMO that use very old versions of the SDK with known leaks.
  • The quick answer is for everyone with an add-on to rebuild it with a new version of the SDK.
  • The not-so-quick answer is being discussed.

Identity

• Sign into the browser independent from Sync
  • Sync continues as-is, with its own accounts
  • Sign into the browser will ship with new services
  • Some of those services will be competitive with Sync

• Sign into the browser "swarm" this week: Platform, Firefox, Identity teams heads-down On SIB.

Apps

• Firefox Desktop 14 (Aurora) - landed
  • Looking to back out this functionality - bug 750936
  • Native Install
  • Chromeless launch of apps

• Mozillian Marketplace Release is out! We need feedback!
  • Please be mindful that this is an internal release and of alpha quality. Early access is limited to Mozillians and partners for testing, so please do not tweet, communicate or share screenshots, features or details about the Marketplace for now.
  • Download Firefox Desktop Nightly (Fx15)
  • Have a look at the wiki to learn more about the testing procedure.
  • If you run into any hiccups, you can report them to apps-feedback@mozilla.com.
  • Once you’re done, there’s also an online survey for you to fill out.

• Firefox Desktop 15 (Nightly)
  • Working on fixing bugs - mostly fit and polish to fit Kilimanjaro requirements

• Firefox Mobile 15 (Nightly) - in progress
  • Work started in Fx14 continues in 15.
  • Proposed marketplace bundling with Fennec is an open issue. See bug 738545

• Apps in the Cloud
  • AITC client continues
  • AITC Server - Completed

Developer Experience

• Responsive Design View has been added to Kilimanjaro. Currently targeting Firefox 15.
• We're also still targeting Firefox 15 for the JavaScript Debugger, which also has remote debugging capability for Android and B2G.
• Also aiming for Firefox 15 for the Developer Toolbar. This feature will start pulling the tools together and providing quick keyboard access via a command line.
• The last major missing piece of functionality for the Firefox developer tools is a network view. Firebug leader Jan (Honza) Odvarko has extracted this functionality from Firebug into a separate addon called HTTP Monitor. The goal is to try sharing this code between Firebug and Firefox. They're also working on making this remotable like the JavaScript Debugger. We're hoping to have this functionality in Firefox soon, but not Firefox 15.
• The Apps developer ecosystem team is making good progress on their projects, including the first documentation "track" that takes web developers from beginning to end through an application. They are also building a "bootstrap" application template that Apps developers can use to get their projects started. More news on these as we get closer to release. These are part of Kilimanjaro.

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 12 issues summary:

We currently have a 5% increase in issues over Firefox 11 at the three week mark. This seems to be a combination of issues including:

PDF Issues on Mac - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747073 [1] [2] [3]

Plugins/Check issue - Resolved - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752232 [4] [5] [6]

Copy/Paste Image - Fixed - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=749527 [7] [8]

Firefox 12 incorrectly caching pages - Bug filed - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751753 [9]

Incompatible Norton Toolbar: Need to update norton 360 and norton internet security suite. [10] [11]

Bookmarks* Could be just lots of updates from older version. Some reports that bookmarks are missing. [12] [13] [14] [15] Possibly related TB issue outstanding: [16] Could be related to other slowness reports we are getting.

FF12 praise summary, down 6% from FF11:

fast: [17] [18] [19]

ui: [20] [21]

stable: [22]

FF13 beta issues summary:

PDF on Mac 96 comments

Flash/video 127 comments 151 comments

FF13 beta praise summary:

Smooth scrolling, well-liked: 67 comments

tab screen: [23] [24] [25]

new start page: [26] [27] [28]

FF14 aurora issues:

Flash: [29] [30]

slow/crashy: [31] [32] [33] [34]

FF14 aurora praise:

Design: [35]

Tools: [36]

Autocomplete URLs: [37] [38] [39]

full screen: [40] [41]

download manager: [42] [43]

FF15 Issues: download manager feedback: [44] [45] [46] [47]

FF15 Praise: download manager: [48] [49]

pdf viewer: [50]

Mobile

• Support forum:
  • https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/926878 (HTML5 comment)
  • https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/926569 (droid blank page/crash report) see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751589 and 751732

• Five Aurora 14.0a2 comments on input:
  • http://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?q=&product=firefox&version=14.0a2&date_start=&date_end=&platform=android (shortcut on homepage issue, ICS recent apps button issue, window-scrolling via mouse)

UX & User Research

UX Design

• [sign-in] Updated interaction flow (desktop): http://people.mozilla.com/~zfang/SignIn/Home.html (Zhenshuo)
  • also, trying to figure out what our pre-SITB sync setup UX is for mobile
• [metro] Video sketch/walkthrough of metro Firefox interactions (Yuan)
  • https://www.dropbox.com/s/0nfd2taz3ap8n37/FX%20Metro%20-%20Start%20Page.mov
  • blog post forthcoming shortly; please don't link too widely yet before we move it to vimeo, etc.
• [desktop] First steps on simplifying preferences; initial look at pref usage, improvement ideas (Zhenshuo)
• [Android] (ibarlow)
  • Tablet UI specs in bugs and work beginning - preview of a blog post with all the bug numbers -- we'll be publishing this post phone-beta
  • phone - exploratory work on menu structure and first-run
• [B2G] Firefox designs stable; B2G workweek this week (Larissa)

Research

Research (Mary Trombley) is gearing up to usability test the new Fennec beta as soon as it's available.

Research on Search Tabs is complete; Cori Schauer is going through the analysis phase now; she should have results in 2-3 weeks.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Android

• In an interesting experiment, a development team led by Miguel de Icaza ported much of the Android OS' environment to C#.

Security

• Adobe released a new beta of Flash Player for Mac OS X that supports silent updates.
• Concern was raised in the press that the impending arrival of Mac OS X Mountain Lion will mean that nearly half of all Mac users will no longer receive security patches

Microsoft

• Microsoft has started mailing "Save the Date" invitations to Windows Phone developers for June 20-21 conference in San Francisco.

Opera

• Opera posted their Q1 2012 financial results. Total revenue for the quarter was $47m, up 28% from the previous year, and net income was up 76%.

Research in Motion

• RIM posted the latest version of bbUI, their HTML5 toolkit that makes HTML5 apps work more seamlessly on their platform.

Tizen

• A good demo of the current state of the Tizen mobile OS is now available
• Sprint, the American wireless carrier, announced that it was joining the Tizen Association
• Tizen also announced more details about their upcoming developer conference, and noted that most of the sessions would be streamed over the web.

WebKit

• The WebKit Inspector tool now offers web socket packet inspection

W3C

• A new proposal by W3C member Florian Rivoal offers a potential solution to the CSS vendor-prefix issue. It would require browser vendors to support both prefixed and unprefixed features from day one, with aliases between the two.

Other

• The Trustworthy Internet Movement launched SSLPulse, a "continuous and global dashboard for monitoring the quality of SSL support across the top one million web sites. "
• An interesting piece by Technology Review magazine about how they, and other magazine and newspaper publishers are looking to move away from proprietary platforms and to HTML5.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Working on video for new tab and new home page for next GA release
• Working on the WN page for next release (will be localized).
• Work underway for blog posts for next round of Firefox releases.