WeeklyUpdates/2009-05-11

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Development Updates

Gecko 1.9.1

• In the news: We're working on process separation in Gecko with a primary goal of improving overall responsiveness on multi-processor machines. Check out the dev.platform thread for details.
• Blocker Status:
  • 10 final blocker bugs left in content. (13 last week)
  • 5 GFX final blockers. (Last week: 6)
  • 5 Layout final blockers. Two w/ patch. (Two weeks ago: 5)
  • JS with 18 blockers. (Last week: 15)
• 22 noms needing triage.
• For weekly engineering meeting notes and other info see the Platform page.
• 57 total 1.9.1 blockers (two weeks ago: 58).

Firefox 3.5

Firefox Front End Work

• 14 blockers left for final release, only two or three of which are complicated
• as mentioned at the platform meeting last week we're aiming to be done with all front-end blockers by next week in order to hit a late-week code freeze on or before the 22nd.
• this schedule will enable an early June release date for the Firefox 3.5 release candidate - getting exciting!

Namoroka

• reminder to review and add your comments/feedback on the discussion page or in the dev-apps-firefox thread

IT

• Started looking at OSX virtualization with SeaMonkey folks

Release Engineering

• Welcome (back!) Armen (armenzg)
• enabled a11y tests on mac
• new standalone talos now include Tshutdown, download from here
• "Caution flag" tomorrow night for EqualLogic firmware upgrade
  • start 7pm PDT until Wed morning
  • powering off 76 VMs
  • closing tree for FF3.0, TB2.0, linux64 slaves on m-c
  • not closing tree for FF3.5, mozilla-central, tracemonkey or TryServer
    • explicit coordinate with sheriff to avoid pileups.

QA

Test Execution

Web Dev Testing, Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

Test Development

• Mostly head's down work, some highlights:
• Invalidation Reftests are going strong
• Did our 1st Test Dev Day - did not have as many people as we had hoped
• Improved Crashtest coverage on 1.9.1 branch
• Site Compare tool is almost ready for prime time
• Accumulating performance measurements for 3.5

Marketing/PR

General

PR

Events

Support

• Enabling new search engine on support.mozilla.com tomorrow, after extensive QAing. Hopefully no serious regressions... :)
  • Based on Sphinx, a free open-source SQL full-text search engine
  • Integrates Knowledge Base and (answered) Forum threads in the results, making the process of finding a solution streamlined for users
• Preliminary screencast support landing on staging server (support-stage.mozilla.org, user/pass: support/stage) this week
  • See blog post: Screencasts are coming!

Metrics

• No updates this week
• Check out blog of metrics for recap of last week's eMetrics Summit

Developer Tools

No updates this week.

Add-ons

• 3.5 Compatibility now at 56%, up 5% from last week. Compatibility mailer going out this afternoon
• Blog posts on Developer.AMO and Contributions, another one going out today with more specifics on Contributions
• Started doing some work measuring performance of top 1000 add-ons to see if we can identify trends and figure out how to surface this data to developers and ultimately end users

Foundation Updates

• Mozilla Education activities are expanding around the world; see Mark's map of where things are happening.
• We're moving forward on revamping the Mozilla Education site; for more please see James Boston's blog post.
• We're interested in people's thoughts about using www.mozilla.org to talk about Mozilla's public benefit activities; please comment on David's blog post.
• We've been thinking more about what's new about hybrid organizations like Mozilla; see Mark's blog post.
• The Open|Web|Content|Education course concluded last week with a seminar on open learning and pedagogy.
• Based on Kathleen Wilson's recommendations, we approved a CA request from SwissSign to enable SwissSign's root for EV and trust it for code signing (bug 453460).