WeeklyUpdates/2009-06-08

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Development Updates

Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x

• Firefox 3.0.11
  • found a blocker, had to respin
  • re-shipped to beta on Friday
  • aiming for a 3pm Thursday release

• Firefox 3.0.12
  • code freeze in a little over a week
  • still lots of blockers
  • might shift final release date by a week to accommodate blockers, 3.0.11 re-spin, and Tb2.0.0.22

• Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 / Gecko 1.8.1.22
  • code frozen, builds in hand
  • QA is testing these and we'll have a revised schedule soon

Gecko 1.9.1

• We've hit zero blockers at least twice, BUT three code related blockers remain.
  • All three are JS.
  • Two of those have a fix and are in process of being finalized. Only one remains.
  • We're blocking on correctness issues, found mostly by JS fuzzers. One plus one should equal 2.
• Since most of the team has wrapped up 1.9.1 blockers, we're focusing on (and have been for a while) future projects and the remaining planning. Watch dev-planning for conversations on the next release.
• Welcome Irina Calciu from CMU!
• For weekly engineering meeting notes and other info see the Platform page.

Firefox 3.5

Firefox Front End Work

• 1 blocker left and it's actually already done!
• monitoring code freeze and helping where possible by finding regression ranges, etc, looking to help QA with testing phase as well

Firefox 3.5 beta 99

• planning on shipping a final "beta" release to get the 6 weeks of fixes out to our beta users
• this isn't a "proper" beta, rather a quick release to help find blockers for final
• hoping to ship soon (today or tomorrow)

Namoroka

• moving on to TSnap bugs which aim to make Firefox observably faster
• also returning to polish bugs and exploratory sprints
• reminder to review and add your comments/feedback on the discussion page or in the dev-apps-firefox thread

TB 3

• Heads down on beta 3 work; waiting for search landing before resetting beta3 dates.
• davida and dmose in Mountain View the first part of this week

Release Engineering

• FF3.0.11, TB2.0.0.22, FF3.5beta99
• office move
• fixed missing entity problem in l10n nightlies. Another big milestone on the way to producing updates for l10n nightlies.

QA

Test Execution

• We are heavily focused on testing of Firefox 3.5 Preview
• Tested Firefox 3.0.11 rebuild (build 2)
• Tested Thunderbird 2.0.0.22

Web Testing, Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Community
  • We had a great test day in Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 B1. See report. One critical ogg seek bug found thanks to kbrosnan!! See bug 496581.
  • Spoke at the Stockholm Mozilla Event
• Accessibility
  • Performed an outreach to various screen reader developers to make sure bug 493695 doesn't break them. Exposing accessibles for table row elements is not that common yet, so we wanted to make sure we'd still work with the screen readers. No problems
  • Filed bug 495912 for support of alternative Canvas element exposure.
• Code Coverage and Project Metrics - Created bugs found vs confirmed metrics. Working on the Pentaho Dash boarding and Data warehousing for bug metrics.
• Web testing - Tested Personas 1.4 website. Testing AMO 5.0.6. Heavily tested SUMO 1.1 (screencast support) -- aim to ship on Tuesday. Worked on Mozilla Service Week.

Test Development

• Mozmill 1.2 will ship this week
• Got FennecMark (Tpan and Tzoom) running on maemo, uploading to tinderbox this week
• Started getting tests reporting on tinderbox for maemo
• Starting on an effort to build out a test harness for DocShell testing (based on Mochi-Chrome)
• Helping with the overall Firefox 3.5 QA Effort

Security

No updates this week.

Marketing/PR

Firefox 3.5 Launch

• The Fastest Firefox community marketing project was launched last week.
• Firefox 3.5 in 35 days: The Evangelism team has been working on a campaign to highlight the cool features Firefox 3.5 offers for web developers with demos and blog posts. Check out the schedule here. Help get the word out by blogging and retweeting (@mozhacks).
• Plan a Firefox 3.5 party! We'll be creating a new page on Spread Firefox with details on how to host parties, but you can get a head start now

Community Marketing Call

• Notes from the June 3rd call can be found here.
• Next Community Marketing call is Wednesday, June 17th, at 10am PDT. Dial-in Info: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#. Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. For those that can't make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on irc.mozilla.org. Please note the new the new Air Mozilla channel for all marketing-related activities.

PR

• Firefox 3.5 in InternetNews
• IT Business profiles Seneca students work with Mozilla
• WIRED covers the evolution since Firefox 1.0
• Firefox 3.5 press tour!

Events

• Open Source Bridge, Portland, June 17 - 19:
  • Mikeal Rogers and Dietrich Ayala are both speaking.
  • Mozilla will participate in the Hacker Lounge. Our proposed session: Firefox & extension hacking. Dietrich will also participate in the Open Web Games session.
  • We're also looking to participate in the Knowledge Fair
  • More details on our participation here.
• Open Video Conference, New York, June 19 - 20:
  • Help get the word out about the conference! http://openvideoconference.org/
  • Chris Blizzard will be speaking on the future of open video
  • We're hosting a video conference that will now kick off at the conference vs. wrapping up then.
• Open Web Conference, Vancouver, June 11 -
  • David Ascher will be speaking
  • Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer will be giving a talk
  • Let Mary know if anyone is local and wants to attend -- we have a few passes.
• Personal Democracy Conference, New York, June 29th - 30th: Mozilla Foundation is sponsoring the PdF conference. Frank could use some help hosting a Mozilla booth -- free passes in exchange!

Support

• Screencast support going live tomorrow! (SUMO 1.1)
• Matthew (zzxc) has been working on improving the Live Chat experience
  • See blog post: Making the Live Chat experience even better
• Results from Live Chat and Forum contributor survey will be published later this week
• Cheng (cww) is working on the next Support Firefox Day, which will take place on Thursday next week (June 18)
  • See planning thread
• Chris (cilias) has worked with localizers to update most of the Knowledge Base content for Firefox 3.5

Metrics

• New Firefox Uninstall Survey
  • Launched on Friday
  • We're currently seeing these numbers: of Fx users uninstalling each day, about 2K agree to take the survey and about 600 complete the survey
  • We're currently figuring out optimal ways for making the data public again
  • Blog post coming soon

Evangelism

• Enabled the new Page Notifications and tag editor features on MDC.
• Wrote new how to guide for using MDC.

• 35 days is up!
  • http://hacks.mozilla.org/
  • http://twitter.com/mozhacks
  • Thanks to Sean, Paul, Laura (x2), Paul, Tristan, Gen and community people for all the hard work

Labs

• A release candidate for the next stability and bug fix version of Personas (version 1.2), with some fixes for late-breaking changes in Firefox 3.5, is available. Try it out and file bugs or post to the discussion group if you notice problems with it.

Developer Tools

- No updates

Add-ons

• AMO 5.0.6 release on Wednesday
  • Almost 300 resolved bugs- check out Fligtar's Moxie Dashboard
  • Redesign of AMO from top to bottom with our first Firefox extension (Add-on Collector) and the Collections feature!
• Compatibility with 3.5 up to 72% thanks to Sun updating the Java Console entry- should be up another 3-4% once they complete testing of the new Java Console
• AMO 5.0.7 release includes Contributions and Tagging, launching on 6/30

Webdev

• AMO 5.0.6 goes live tomorrow (bug 496907) - huge release. over 285 bugs closed, average of 11 bugs per work day. see some stats
• Mozilla Service week is staged and looking great see a demo
• SUMO 1.1 (screencasts) to go live this week, just waiting on IE QA to confirm Tuesday or Thursday
• http://hacks.mozilla.org launched

L10n

Firefox 3.5

• If you haven't read about the improvements to Mozilla's l10n-build process, you have to read these two blog posts:
  1. Lots of small steps add up to big changes
  2. Got l10n builds?

Web

• We're asking last localization teams to finish up for Firefox 3.5, including a lot of work to be done on the Mozilla Getting Started page.
• Web parts status.

Foundation Updates

• We continue to prepare for the relaunch of www.mozilla.org:
  • June 30th is the tentative launch date
  • We are doing a content refresh -- 'our cause', 'contribute', 'about' and 'manifesto' are major priorities
  • A number of new volunteers and community members have started to help, but more help still needed. Let us know if you are interested.
• We're getting ready for next week's mission+market+web hybrid summit for organizations like Mozilla mashing up public benefit missions, market strategies and web-like organizing structures; for more information see the agenda and Mark's series of blog posts.
• We're continuing to focus on how best to describe and promote the Mozilla way, including trying to
  • describe Mozilla in one sentence (add your own thoughts)
  • sum up the Internet's hackability/remixability/generativeness in one word
  • decide if we want to promote one cause or many on www.mozilla.org
• We're also working to improve education.mozilla.org, including determining how best to structure the site.
• On Kathleen Wilson's recommendation, we approved a CA request from Chunghwa Telecom to have its root included in Mozilla (bug 448794).

Roundtable

We have one new intern starting today in the platform group. Please give a warm round of applause for Irina Calciu.