WeeklyUpdates/2009-10-19

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Development Updates

Firefox

( Projects | Status | Goals | People )

Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka)

Firefox Future

Team News

Gecko

• Electrolysis (E10s)
  • Windowed plugins mostly working (Windows and Linux)
  • Windowless plugins working on Linux, to work on Windows soon. May have slow performance until work on asynchronous painting is done.
  • Plan to land the existing code into mozilla-central, preffed off, as soon as some blockers are done. See bug 523094 for details and a dependency tree.
  • Have very hacky demos of multi-process browsing
  • Working on getting Fennec working with multi-process browsing.
• GFX
  • Robert O'Callahan, Jeff Muizelaar and Bas Schouten have been iterating on an API and requirements for a Layers API, akin to Core Animation, that will enable easy hardware acceleration and certain types of animation. We welcome everyone's input.
  • Windows 7 support (bug 474052) has been coming along well. Aero Peek has landed in 3.6, but Jump Lists and download status in the Windows 7 task bar will have to wait for 3.7.
  • Bas Schouten has been tearing stuff up. In addition to contributing to the Layers API mentioned above, he came up with a proof-of-concept full-screen video implementation using OpenGL (bug 510057) and has been working on making our font rendering in Windows 7 significantly better by using DirectWrite (bug 517642).
• CrashKill meetings will continue. We really dig into details of crashes and people seem to find the in-depth discussions on how to resolve a particular crash useful.
• Blockers:
  • P1: 1
  • P2: 92
  • P3: 0
  • Other: 0
• Team blocker numbers:
  • Layout: 14
  • Content: 19
  • GFX: 9
  • JS: 29

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

• Firefox 3.0.15 / Firefox 3.5.4

• Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.5

QA

Test Execution

• Sent more cold/warm startup times to dietrich on XP for 3.5.5pre, 3.6b2pre, 3.7a1 pre. Some inconsistencies found.

Web Dev Testing

• Completed final testing of AMO 5.2
• Testing Jetpack is still in progress
• Personas: Created testcases for Personas support and Developer Hub.
• Automating AMO test cases to validate search with Selenium
• Created a new test plan template and solicited feedback. This is posted to mozilla.dev.quality.

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Community
  • Held a Website Compatibility Testing Testday for Fx3.6 on Friday, October 16th. See results.
  • Connected with two new community members via VolunteerMatch!

Test Development

• Changes to mochitest to run Out Of Process Plugins checked in
• Preliminary test development for XBL2 Specification is ready for contribution
• Test Dev Team will be in Mountain View the week of November 9.
• Other notes are here

Marketing/PR

PR

• Lots of weekend news around disabling and then enabling the .Net plugin
• John Lilly and Jay Sullivan at Play Conference over the weekend - Weave app for iPhone?
•  Mozilla's plugin page launches to much fanfare

General

• Released the Plugin Check Page last Tuesday: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck
  • 389K page views in 6 days compared to get personal page (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html) which got 411K views in the same time period.
  • Planning on celebrating the release of this page sometime this week with a small cantina night.
• Next steps of the project are Localization and integrating all browsers into the service.

Five Years of Firefox

• Nov. 9, 2009
• "Light the World with Firefox"
  • Celebrating the milestone by having fun with light & the Firefox logo. You can participate by loading a picture or video to Flickr with the tag "Fx5yr". Best pictures & actions rewarded with cool Firefox swag!
    • Spotlight: Borrow a projector and shine the Firefox logo on the wall during your party, or make a logo stencil and place it in front of a flashlight for a cool effect. Or, go crazy and get a searchlight to create your very own Firefox "bat signal"!t pictures & actions rewarded with cool Firefox swag! Here are some ideas:
    • Mash-Up: Think of the most interesting way you can combine Firefox and light. For example, create the logo out of candles on a birthday cake or program your very own lite brite! The more creative, the better.
    • Mobile: Get the Firefox logo on your phone [link to come] and take a picture holding it in front of a local landmark. Or, organize a bunch of friends for a big group photo with the logo on everyone's phones.
• Looking for party hosts! Please get in your swag requests here

Events

• Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre en Chile and MozCamp Chile October 5 - 9, 2009, Santiago, Chile - We will be doing a brown bag this Wednesday 10/21 at 1PM PDT to talk about our experiences and the results of these two events. https://wiki.mozilla.org/JRSL_Chile
• Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) October 29 - 30, 2009; Toronto, Canada.  We are sponsoring this event.  We currently have representation from both Mozilla Foundation and Corporation speaking.
• Music Hack Day November 21-22, 200; Boston, MA.  We are currently looking into sponsoring this event.
  
• Add-on-Con December 2009, Mountain View, CA.  We are sponsoring this event and starting to build sessions around the event theme.
• Internet Identity Workshop November 3-5, 2009.  Will be sponsoring this conference.  
• OWASP AppSec DC 2009  November 10-13, 2009; Washington, DC.  Web application security conference - we are currently looking into sponsoring this.
• Foundations of Open Media Software January 13 - 15, 2010; Wellington, New Zealand.  Perfect venue to promote open video.  We are currently looking into sponsoring this.
• SXSW Interactive 2010  March 12-16, 2010; Austin, Texas.  Working on putting together a Firefox party.  Please continue to check our wiki page for information.
  

Community

Support

• Time to start planning the SUMO goals in 2010!
• Three primary focus areas:
  • Improve the support experience for users
  • Provide better/more accurate/more detailed metrics and insights for other Mozilla teams and the entire Mozilla community
  • Make the SUMO experience more enjoyable for contributors
• Post your feedback in the contributor discussion
• See also blog post: Help us plan SUMO in 2010!

Metrics

• No updates this week.

Webdev

• AMO 5.2 open bugs & fixed bugs Launch 10/20 moxie
• SUMO 1.4.1 launches Thursday 10/22
• Les and Melissa are working on revamping the press center page -- read more about it
• Helped with blocklist stuff over the weekend

L10n

Just updates around Fennec today:

Productization - Search engines

Staś posted in .l10n about choosing search engines for localized Fennec. Targeting end of October. The guidelines can be found at L10n:Mobile/Productization. 34 per-locale bugs filed so far, all blocking the tracking bug (bug fennec10-l10n-search) (check a slightly more detailed view, too).

Web pages

Pascal filed the tracking bug: bug fennec10-l10n-web, 34 per-locale bugs were filed as dependencies of the tracking bug; SMS issues are tracked in bug 517152