WeeklyUpdates/2009-08-24

« previous week | index | next week »

Development Updates

Firefox

Firefox Front End Work

• review our list of active projects and this quarter's goals
• as well, our team is blogging progress reports on Planet Mozilla which is hopefully helpful; eventually we'll have a better way to do this roundup, but for now:
  • Dietrich would like to talk to you about progress we've enjoyed on startup performance, as would Drew
  • Boriss needs your input on animating the Firefox UI
  • Curtis has an update on nicer 404 error pages
  • Felipe excites and amazes with a demonstration of multitouch UI in webpages
  • Blair is working on a bunch of things, such as alerting users about outdated plugins, getting Taskfox review-ready, and looking at JetPack integration
  • Dave is thinking about how to let users know when other software has installed Add-ons in their Firefox, which is important
  • Dao has some information to share about work towards integrating Personas into Firefox

Namoroka

• next milestone: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1
• still working through triage, waiting on some l10n estimates in order to get a timeline fleshed out, looking at mid-to-late September for a beta
• goals are startup time, responsiveness, Windows 7 readiness and polish
• stretch goals include things like determining if Personas can be included as well as some changes to how the updater works to include plugin updates

Team News

• this is Matthew Noorenberghe's last week with us as a Firefox intern, he'll be finishing up work on the new notification UI project this week
• the whole team is in Mountain View this week, hanging out in "Very Strong, Very Mighty"

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

• Firefox 3.0.14 / Firefox 3.5.3
  • builds started today
  • targeting early-mid September release

• Firefox 3.0.15 / Firefox 3.5.4
  • schedule, queries available on the wiki
  • targeting mid-late October release
  • code freeze is September 22 at 11:59pm

• Thunderbird 2.0.0.23
  • shipped last week
  • tracking an issue with some mail servers which don't work properly over SSL (bug 511921)

TB 3

Target dates (subject to change):

• 3.0b4
  • Slushy Code Freeze: Monday 7th Sept 23:59 PDT.
  • Full String Freeze: Wed 9th Sept 23:59 PDT.
  • Code Freeze: Friday 11th Sept 23:59 PDT.
  • l10n Complete: Monday 14th Sept 23:59 PDT.
  • Release builds start: Tues 15th Sept.

• 3.0RC1
  • Final l10n String Freeze: Tuesday 29th Sept 23:59 PST
  • Approvals/Blockers only: from Tuesday 6th October 23:59 PST
  • Aiming to start RC1 builds on: 3rd Nov.
  • Subsequent RCs as necessary.

IT

Last Week

• hg issues
  • changed Apache to spaw new thread per request

This Week

• New log processing box for metrics (im-log03)
• VeriSign EV cert for addons.mozilla.org (08/25/2009) bug 503040
• Turning up Layer42

The Amsterdam Reboot

• Will start turning down Amsterdam websites Tuesday night

QA

Test Execution

• Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 - Finished BFTs, l10n testing, and Releasetest and Release update testing
• Working on bug fix verification for Firefox 3.0.14 and 3.5.3
• Tested and shipped Fennec 1.0 beta 3 last week
• Tegra testing now has software updates checked in, and about 800 reftests executed and running

Web Dev Testing

• Mozilla Creative Collective and Mozilla Service Week releases were shipped this week.
• Testing AMO 5.0.9 features. Added 4 Litmus test cases for login section. Also wrote 6 automated Selenium test cases.
• Verified bug fixes Sumo 1.3 and wrote litmus test cases
• Wrote Litmus test cases for Spread Firefox and mozilla.com

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Community:
  • Held a Fennec 1.0 Beta Testday. Results can be found here
    • Verified over 300 bugs last week! (thanks to aakash and joel)
  • Help a Code Coverage QA meet-up last Wednesday. We had a good discussion about what works and wha tto watch out for. See Preso.
  • Coordinating with Florian from OpenOffice about the next Opensource Meetup on September 25
• Accessibility:
  • Reviewed bug 510441. This important for NVDA grant work on improving WAI-ARIA support.
  • Marcoz became a moderator in the German camp-firefox.de community (the largest Firefox-based forum) in the newly created form "Barrierefreiheit" (German for "accessibility"). This is a great opportunity to help community members there.
  • Went to the Best Practices Stammtisch Essen on Monday August 17, and gave a talk on WAI-ARIA. We looked at Accessible Twitter as an example of good usage of WAI-ARIA landmark roles. The "Best Practices Stammtisch Essen" is a bi-weekly meetup of web workers from the Ruhrgebiet area in Germany, exchanging knowledge in areas such as accessibility, HTML5 and other topics. They looked at CSS3 transforms in action. See blog about the positive accessibility impacts of using them.
• Projects Metrics (AKA Firefly)
  • Found bugs in jscoverage tool and got the fix landed in the tool. See bug 511444. Started Firefox instrumentation effort on Windows platform. Several new blog entries were posted: Success stories, Bug metrics plans, and updates on code coverage automation and troubleshooting.

Test Development

• Got reftests running over http (pointing tests to an external http server)
  • Only three tests fail when running with Firefox
  • Used this to run 800 tests on windows CE (before Firefox crashed)
• Landed JS Ref tests - you can now run JS tests in the browser using a reftest style manifest
• Worked a lot on Mobile last week
• Tags implemented for Test Case Manager, almost ready to release a preview for feedback
• More notes here

Marketing/PR

PR

• Fennec beta 3 for Maemo released. Highlights in CNET, The H, Pocketnow
• Information Week's "Which Browser and Why?"
• Mozilla's response to MSFT's EU proposal in Computerworld, BetaNews and the Seattle PI
• Mozilla Service Week in the InformationWeek, Heise online, and PC World and Jolie O'Dell's blog

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.
• WordCamp Philippines September 19, 2009 in Makati City, Philippines - We are sponsoring this event.  Our mission is to help build up the Philippine community and build the Tagalog locale.
  
• 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.
  
• Festschrift Symposium on Mitchell Wand September 19, 2009 in Boston, MA.  We are sponsoring this event.  Our labs intern, Brandon Pung is representing Mozilla at the event.

Community

Metrics

• Found that roughly 50% of traffic to Firefox Support is accidental. Read why Cats Love Firefox Support.
• Discovered why people refuse Firefox Major Update offers
  • #1 reason cited by users?
  • Read recommendations for UI and marketing changes

Evangelism

• Mozilla Developer Center
  • As always, make sure your bugs are tagged with the dev-doc-needed keyword if they will need explaining to developers or web developers.
  • Fixed at least most of the problems left over after the server glitch last week. Still sorting out the outlying cases.
  • Can now sort tables on MDC, which will make many things nicer.
  • Preparing to upgrade MDC to the just-about-to-release MindTouch 9.08 release.

Labs

• Labs Night this Thursday, 6-8pm in Ten Forward. Guest speakers will be Li Gong from Mozilla Online in Beijing, and a mystery guest speaker
• The new Labs website is live.
• We have a new beta of Jetpack 0.5, with improved security and audio support.
• We also announced a contest to write the coolest Jetpack extension (Deadline October 15).
• Weave 0.6pre, with the final Weave 0.6 release hopefully this week. It includes better Fennec UI, better error handling, and about:weave, a new web-based UI for logging in and creating accounts.

Webdev

• AMO 5.0.9 launching on Thursday. ~100 bugs fixed
• mozilla.com now shares Firefox download stats. read about it or see how awesome
• Mozilla Service Week
  • Launched 4 new locales and several new partners
  • ko and sq coming soon
• Mozilla Creative Collective Launch: http://creative.mozilla.org
• Labs 2.0 website launch: http://labs.mozilla.org

Foundation Updates

• The first Mozilla Service Week action template is up: The Internet Health Check
• The mozilla.org site relaunches tomorrow

Roundtable

Intern Show & Tell

This week we have the following interns presenting: