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

• Fx 3.0.10 - Fx 3.5b4 MU WinXP testing
• Mozmill automation of smoketests coverage here

Web Dev Testing, Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Project for [Website Testing] has been created on QMO and now we are open for country and company suggestions. Please participate and send us your [request] which companies are missing!
• The first firebug testday last week brought great results. See here
• Next QA meetup will be held on Wed, 5/13
  • Purpose: Clint Talbert, QA Testdev lead, will be performing reftest demos!
  • If you can attend, please add yourself to the Participants list!

Test Development

• 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

Evangelism

• Documentation
  • Cleanup work for Firefox 3.5 release continues as usual.
  • Preparation for MDC upgrades continues.

• 35 Days Project
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Evangelism/Firefox3.5/35Days
  • Please sign up for a feature if you want to do a post.
  • Also keep an eye out for great open web demos we want to highlight.

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

Webdev

• We tweeted
• Careers buttons - looking for feedback or new ideas about how to do this, all suggestions welcome
• Download Day campaign won some awards! Congrats to NoBox and the Download Day team.
• Socorro
  • Lars, Aravind, Austin and Frank have migrated crash dumps off the database and into a file system. This is already resulting in lower database load and faster lookups of individual crashes.
  • Hardware migration to follow (more RAM, CPU, moving 64-bit); Lars will post a blog update this week.
• SUMO
  • 1.0.2 going out Tuesday with new Sphinx search
  • Screencasts support will be up on staging this week for playing and experimentation
• AMO
  • Les Orchard is cranking on the new AMO front page -- we can smell the goodness (it's in progress but will eventualy look like this)
  • AMO 5.0.6 is coming along nicely -- open bugs & fixed bugs Freeze 5/22 - Launch 5/28

L10n

• Gandalf/Axel working on l10n dashboard, several enhancements coming
• Axel continuing to work with RelEng on l10n-build
  1. Armen will start to work on l10n nightly updates
  2. Fennec builds are moving along nicely thanks to Axel and Aki (et al.)
  3. Axel is continuing his blogging about build changes coming
• Pascal leading the localization of web pages for Firefox 3.5
  1. First Run Page
  2. What's New
  3. Geolocation
  4. Major Update Box
• Other localization projects working right now
  1. Mozilla Service week
  2. Upcoming Fennec pages
  3. AMO projects
• Stas working on Productization Dashboard
• 70 locales are scheduled for Firefox 3.5 release but we have some new ones also coming that should make it
  1. Oriya
  2. Romansch
  3. Malayalam
• Fennec localization: L10-drivers will start communication push

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).