WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-30

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Friends of the Tree

• Suneel wrote in with these nominations:
  • Chris Beard, Myk Melez, and Tomcat for developing and testing extension 1.4 with a better look, and lots of cool new functionality.
  • Ryan Doherty and Stephen Donner for pushing version 1.9 of the website and their diligence for reading a redesign for 3.6.
  • Seth Bindernagel and Stas Malolepszy for their flexibility and hard work in helping make Personas as accessible in as many languages as possible.
• Harvey and the legal team asked that we recognize Eckhart Wörner as a friend of the tree for his generous donation of several "mozilla" and "firefox" .de domain names.
• Tony wrote, "I'd like to nominate Henrik Skupin (aka whimboo) for FotT this week. He's been thoroughly testing the DLL blocklisting and component whitelisting functionality that has landed in Fx3.6beta 4. This feature is critical to protect users from malware and unwanted dll installations which has led to top crashing issues. A very detailed testplan and results is tracked here, which includes a tedious list of checking top 100 software downloads, manually observing all the .js and .dll files are behaving as expected."
• Marco gives a big shout out for Mick and Jamie from the NDVA project. "NVDA, an open-source screen reader for the blind for Windows, was released last week as version 2009.1 with strong support for Firefox 3.0 through 3.6, and much of this is due to MoFo funding and the great work of Mick and Jamie whose bug reports have lead to good improvements in our accessibility API, strengthening our over-all platform support."

Development Updates

Firefox

( Projects | Status | Goals | People )

Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka)

• Released Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 on Thursday, Nov 26th in the morning
• if you're working on an add-on that integrates with the new lightweight theme technology, please take note of this late change to the observers/notifications structure
• latest metrics show half of our 400,000+ beta users are running beta 4
• data from these users is helping us ensure a very stable Firefox 3.6 release
• closing on blockers in order to deliver a release candidate build this week
  • still aiming to be ready to ship in late December
• mozilla-central will remain restricted to 1.9.2 blockers and approved patches only

Firefox Future

• Blair has posted builds that implement tab matches in the awesomebar
• when the mozilla-central tree re-opens, bsmedberg and the E10s team will be landing out of process plugin work
• Vlad has created an Android Project Wiki for those looking to get involved with porting Firefox to Android using the Android NDK
• Rob Strong is looking at updater fixes for Firefox 3.7 and wants input and feedback

Team News

• we're interviewing for internships with the Firefox team - apply today!

Gecko

• We killed and added blockers over the holiday. 38 remaining blockers for 1.9.2. Watching and fixing regressions & crashes based on beta feedback.
• News from the CrashKill front:
  • These numbers are being updated as we get more data from the beta 4 testers. It's really hard to tell if this beta crashes more than beta 3. We'll know more in a few days.
  • Reminder: We now have the ability to block specific DLLs from loading. For the list of DLLs we intend to block, see bug 525103.
• Blockers:
  • P1: 2
  • P2: 11
  • P3: 0
  • Other: 25
• Team blocker numbers:
  • Layout: 4
  • Content: 1
  • GFX: 3
  • JS: 21

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

• Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6
  • builds started today
  • planning to go to beta this week, after QA spot checks
  • on track for mid-December ship date

• Firefox 3.0.17 / Firefox 3.5.7
  • schedules posted
  • early February release target
  • any feedback on these?

• Firefox 3.0.15 -> 3.5.5 Prompted Major Update (PMU)
  • overall crashes in 3.5.5 are down from 3.5.3 and 3.5.4 thanks to CrashKill
  • some crashes were fixes in our code, others were blocklisted add-ons
  • even more fixes coming in 3.5.6
  • as a result, we'd like to resume pushing users from 3.0.x to 3.5.x
  • planning to go live with a PMU tomorrow morning

Release Engineering

• releases for 3.0.16 and 3.5.6 in progress
• another super-quick turnaround for 3.6b4 last week

QA

Test Execution

• Shipped and Tested Fx3.6b4 to Beta
• Major Update testing this week: Fx3.0.15 -> Fx3.6.x & Fx3.5.5 -> Fx3.6.x
• Completed DLL Blocklisting testing, pending a major update test on linux. (henrik)
• Ongoing crashkill analysis. See list of issues that QA is investigating.

Web Dev Testing

• AMO - Testing AMO 5.4 is in progress.Release is scheduled for Dec 8th. Added 6 test cases to developer profile.
• SUMO - Testing of SUMO 1.5 is in progress. Release is scheduled for Dec 3rd.

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Accessibility
  • NVDA 2009.1 released! Big shout out to Mick and Jamie for this release. They have been collaborating with the Mozilla Foundation and the A11y team for a long team. They are a MoFo grantee. Their strong efforts have lead to good improvements in our accessibility API, strengthening our over-all platform support.
  • Submitted, investigated, reviewed, and verified a number of crashes and regressions. See bug 529442, bug 529371, bug 528311.

• Community
  • This Friday, Dec 4th, is a Weave Beta Testday!
  • Sent mail out to betatesters, macqa and vistaqa lists requesting testing of 3.6 B4 candidate.
  • Successful 1st OpenSource Meetup in Leipzig, Germany last Monday, November 23!
• Localization
  • Started the Firefox 3.6 locales testing cycle for 16 key locales.
  • Coordinating a testing event with es-MX

Test Development

Security

• No updates.

Marketing/PR

PR

• Li Gong interviewed for ZDNet Asia piece
• CNET and others cover 2008 Financial news
• Chris Blizzard in GigaOm piece on future of browsers
• Johnathan Nightingale interviewed in WalletPop piece on consumer safety online
• 3.6 Beta 3 and Beta 4 released

Five Years of Firefox

General

Events

• Add-on-Con December 2009, Mountain View, CA.  We are sponsoring this event and will have 3 sessions:  Taking Flights with JetPack (Aza), Mobile Firefox Add-on Development (Mark Finkle), Future of Add-on Ecosystem (Justin, Nick, add-on developer community member). There will be an Add-ons workshop on Thursday night 12/10 where we will be working on 3.6 and fennec compatibility.  Please signup for the Pre-Add-on-Con workshop here.
  
• Sunlight Labs Great American Hackathon December 12-13, 2009; Mountain View, CA.  We will be holding a hackathan at Mozilla HQ on Saturday and Sunday 12/12-12/13.  Please signup for the workshop here.
  
• 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.
• Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2010 January 20-22, 2010; Madrid Spain.  We are sponsoring this event.
  
• SXSW Interactive 2010  March 12-16, 2010; Austin, Texas.  Working on sponsorship opportunities and Firefox party.  Please continue to check our wiki page for information.
  
• Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 2010) June 10, 2010; Toronto, Canada.  We are sponsoring this event.
  

Support

• No updates this week.

Metrics

• Today is Cyber Monday. Historically we’ve seen a usage spike on this day... we’ll publish some numbers if we see something similar today.
• User Outreach
  • Published findings based on user comments from the Firefox Update/Whatsnew page. Top comment was “Firefox is great”.
  • But we also saw two points of frustration from users: (1) crashiness, and (2) Firefox not saving a user’s settings. We previously saw this latter issue and a fix will be shipped in the next release of Fx.

Developer Tools

• No updates this week.

Webdev

• Legal updates for mozilla.com
• Socorro 1.2 code freeze is tomorrow, launch is 12/3
• AMO 5.4 launches 12/8

Foundation Updates

• Over 1,000 people have contacted us about contributing to Mozilla through the new Get Involved page over the last month. If you're interested in bringing new people into your project, please contact david at mozillafoundation dot org.

• Today is the last day to get your submission in for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge.