WeeklyUpdates/2009-09-21

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Development Updates

Firefox

( Projects | Status | Goals | People )

Namoroka (Firefox 3.6)

• next milestone: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1
• Cleared nomination backlog, 31 front end blockers remain.
• Some of the notable work this week includes:
  • now string-frozen
  • progress on getting Personas integrated into 3.6
  • pushing to get the long-requested about:support troubleshooting page done, to make SUMO's life better. bug 367596

Team News

• we hit most of our Q3 goals
• now starting process of setting Q4 goals

Gecko

• Making progress on Flash crashes re: Facebook and other sites. If anyone is experiencing lots of crash in Flash, on Facebook, we could use help debugging. See this bug for more info.
• We're still at 119 blockers for 1.9.2. Javascript triage happened last week, raising the numbers a bit. Today and tomorrow, we'll go over the lists again and make sure, again, the blockers are really blockers. JS bugs have all been prioritized as well with owners.
• Blockers:
  • P1: 25
  • P2: 64
  • P3: 4
  • Other: 29
• Team blocker numbers:
  • Layout: 31
  • Content: 20
  • GFX: 10
  • JS: 34

(Will updated these with links shortly).

Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x

• Firefox 3.0.14 / Firefox 3.5.3

• Firefox 3.0.15 / Firefox 3.5.4

• Thunderbird 2.0.0.23

Thunderbird

• 3.0b4 is expected to ship tomorrow (Tuesday, September 22).
• 3.0RC1 work is underway; help very much appreciated:
  • run a nightly build and provide feedback/filing bugs (please nominate as blocking-thunderbird? if appropriate)
  • write a patch for a blocker bug

SeaMonkey

• Feedback from SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2, released roughly a week ago, is good so far
• Some people are quite excited that Lightning calendar can be installed now
• Freeze for 2.0 probably on Oct 6, release later that month

IT

Last Week

• The Amsterdam Reboot
  • Now serving addons.mozilla.org!
  • Now serving developer.mozilla.org!
  • Dropped avg. page load times on AMO by 2 sec.
• Turned up 4Gbps connection to Layer42, sending production traffic

This Week

• Operations Status Dashboard (v1)!
  • Read about it here
  • Leave comments there or here.

QA

Test Execution

Web Dev Testing

• Testing AMO 5.1 is in progress
• Verified changes for phase 3 of Mozilla Service Week.
• Testing of Student signature contest is in progress.
• Testing of SUMO 1.4 is in progress.

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Community
  • Community helped with flash crash issue: We sent out calls for help via QMO (1, 2), irc, and Facebook. Several people responded!
  • Held a Test Day last Friday on New features for 3.6
  • Next Open Source meet-up in Munich on Friday, September 25. Tell your German Friends!
  • Next Mountain View Community Meet-up is on Wednesday, Sept, 23. Topic is Feature Exploration/Live Testing.
  • We are presenting at the EU_MozCamp_2009/Schedule/QA_Track EU MozCaomp in Pragueon Saturday and Sunday, October 3-4. Members of the QA team will be talking about testing projects and how to get involved.
  • Detected that users on Ubuntu with an official release/nightly build from Mozilla are not able to send Crash reports due to use of a non-default installed libcurl library bug 517493
• Accessibility: One of the major screen reader venders, Freedom Scientific, released a public Beta for JAWS 11 recently. Last week was spent testing this public beta.
• Metrics: New Project Metrics dashboard is available along with pages for AMO 5.1 and SUMO 1.4

Test Development

• Have the first pass of the automatic crash reproduction system working - pulling URLs from a database, spinning builds, running tests, pushing results back into the database
• First set of NPAPI stream tests landed, Plugin scripting tests are next
• Working through the issues with Python CE and identifying what is blocking bringing up Talos on Python CE.
• More details here

Security

No updates

Marketing/PR

PR

• Mozilla support for WebGL in The Register
• Flash upgrade results features in GHacks, Download Squad, Geek.com, InternetNews, SC Magazine and ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, Heise
• Mozilla cleared of U.S export rules feature in Internet News and on the front page of Slashdot
• ComputerWorld covers Firefox sprint updates
• Mark Surman talks open video
• Moz Service Week kicks off in Tree Hugger, Wed User and Tech Republic

Mozilla Service Week

Events

• Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre en Chile October 7 - 9, 2009, Santiago, Chile - Sponsoring event and bringing together the Mozilla Hispanic Community. + 2 day MozCamp Prior. Invitations have been sent out and we will have around 40 people attending including 6 MoCo representatives.
• WordCamp Philippines September 19, 2009 in Makati City, Philippines - Waiting to hear back from Gen/Seth on their update.
• Philippine Blog Awards October 9, 2009 in Luzon, Philippines - We are sponsoring this event.  Our mission is to help build up the Philippine community and build the Tagalog locale.

Community

Metrics

• 10,000,000 clicks to flash update page at adobe.com (the number currently stands at close to 12M)
• Firefox Uninstall Survey
  • When we re-launched earlier this year, one key aspect we didn’t promote much is the new reporting interface (it’s public)
  • You may recall that when we quizzed you about the #1 reason, the answer was a tie between “crashes” and “just temporary” (this was back in June). Now looking at the data trended over time, “crashes” has since shown a significant increase. We’ll likely blog with some insights.

Evangelism

(blizzard traveling for work; arun to give update)

• Held a "Summit" of developers to get feedback on Firefox's future directions. Attended by recognized developers, including folks from Facebook, Apple (mobileMe), Google, Yahoo, Ruby devs, etc.
• MDC had to be restored from a backup after a database corruption problem late yesterday. Any edits made between 7 AM Sunday morning and around 8 PM or so were lost.

Developer Tools

• Ben and Joe were at The Ajax Experience
• Firefox Platform summit was on Friday
• Bespin 0.4.4 "Bubba Ho-Tep" was released (bugfixes)

This week:

• Live file history - initial release of this feature planned for this week.
• Bespin "Reboot" planning (next week, we're on site to work through a structural overhaul of Bespin's code)
• Plugin loading/infrastructure for Bespin Reboot
• Set up new Bespin hg repositories that will be a home for the Reboot code. Will also be breaking the server and client into separate repos.

Add-ons

• AMO 5.1 launches next week, check out our work in progress at [1]
• Welcome Jorge Villalobos, Add-ons Developer Relations Lead

Webdev

• Work continues on PFS2 demo. Our hope is to take the success of the Flash experiment and broaden it to all plugins.
• AMO 5.1 in code freeze
• Socorro materialized views push was successful last Thursday. MTBF, URL and Top Crasher backend was refactored and improved. Reporter changes to follow.
• Met with Metrics team to discuss needs for crash analysis and statistics.

L10n

• Localizers are in the middle of Firefox 3.6 string freeze
• Finishing up the often-changing content of Mozilla Service Week -- thanks for hanging in there, localizers!
• Pascal working with Fennec web team to finalize content
• Stas examined all the Get Personas code base and gave detailed feedback to web dev on steps to make it fully localizable
• Gandalf is working on wrapping up quarterly goals like a new release of Silme and working on further data integration into the l10n dash board
• L10n track is finalized and posted for the Prague MozEU camp

Foundation Updates

• Tomorrow is One Web Day. Our main push is a I <3 the web poster campaign campaign, as well as fundraising for OneWebDay.
  • Please participate by posting a photo of yourself on Flickr or using this poster for your twitter icon. Use the #owdposter tag.
• Also, updated the Internet Health Check campaign, asking people to search out and upgrade computers with IE6. This is another thing you can do for One Web Day.
• Frank posted a proposed framework for strategic grantmaking