WeeklyUpdates/2009-09-28
Friends of the Tree 
Jane wrote in last Tuesday: "Please can I nominate Mary Colvig for all her tremendous work on Mozilla Service Week this week (its only Tuesday and she's already done so much!). She's work tirelessly to get the project off its feet, brought incredible partners on board and encouraged our community on a global level to participate to do even more good in the world. Also big shout outs to: Austin - "King of the Mozserve website", Krupa & Stephen "Prince & Princess of QA" Donner."
Ludovic wrote: "The thunderbird QA team would like to nominate the following people to be friends of the tree, Christoph Grether, Jens Müller, and Thomas D., or the very good feedback, and bugs they reported against the new search feature of Thunderbird."
Gozer wrote in: "I wish to nominate Henry Nester for friend of the tree. He is our #1 thunderbird 3 tester by far and a key part of the push to Thunderbird 3, primo tester of .de locale build, an awesome spot check tester of localized builds, and also a great bug reporter."
Development Updates
Firefox
Firefox Front End Work
Team News
Gecko
- Last week we proposed a set of goals for Q4. I've received some great feedback, and there will be changes.
- We're going to be changing/removing a few goals in order for us to focus on crashes on a massive scale. Friday evening, we formed a small team to kill top crashers. Over the next several weeks we plan to dramatically reduce those crashes.
- Speaking of crashes, last week the CoolIris team released an update to their plug-in that triggered a spike in crashes in the plug-in, resulting in their plug-in being the top crasher in Firefox 3 and 3.5. They worked over the weekend, along with guys on our team who helped identify the issue, to back out the changes.
- It's spikes like the above that demonstrate the importance of completing out of process plug-ins. Last Friday, I saw a demo--and I hope we see a blog post/video demo soon--of flash running out of process in our browser, where killing the process running flash left the browser running fine. Maybe Ben Turner can share that with the world soon? ;)
- Blockers:
- Team blocker numbers:
Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
Thunderbird
- Shipped 3.0b4
- Hard at work on patches for the 3.0 string freeze, which is tomorrow (Tuesday, September 29, 23:59 Pacific)
SeaMonkey
Mobile
IT
Last Week
- Secret Singapore Project
- Now serving addons.mozilla.org!
- Dropped avg. global page load times on AMO.
Release Engineering
QA
This was a big week for goals. Reviewed Q3 top level goals along with completed first draft of Q4 top level goals (to be posted soon).
Test Execution
- Investigating crashes such as bug 517957, bug 519039, and several others. Monitoring Firefox crashes from Twitter reporters.
- Fennec: Verified 76 Bugs; Filed 21 bugs; Triaged 112 bugs; and Submitted QA B4 Blocker List; Also Vetted 39 Litmus Test Reports from the Fennec 1.0 Test Run
- Continued work on Firefox 3.5.4 and 3.0.15 bug fix verifications
Web Dev Testing
- Completed final testing for SUMO 1.4 release last week!
- Blogged about testing search in AMO 5.1 (and beyond)
- Continuing to converted a manual AMO test cases to automated selenium test cases
Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
- Accessibility:
- Published a blog post highlighting what's happening in Mozilla-funded accessibility projects.
- First alpha release of the Firebug Accessibility Extension is coming. This is an extension that helps test web sites for accessibility, WAI-ARIA and otherwise.
- Community:
- Fantastic ! 2nd Opensource Meeting in Munich. See blog. There was an interesting talk from the LiMux Team about Firefox as default in Munich and the German Foreign Office. Next Opensource Meeting in Munich will be November 13 or 20 - Interested People can signup for the mailing list to get informed about the next events !
- Metrics: Worked with Murali to automatically get dashboards for Web Test projects (or any project). It's really cool. Example dashboard.
Test Development
- JS Browser Reftest is in the Tree!
- Getting close to a mechanism for bugzilla review tracking
- Working on our Q4 goals
- More information is here.
Security
Marketing/PR
PR
Mozilla Service Week
Events
Community
Mozilla.com
- Plan for the 3.6 version of the site is up: check it out
Support
Metrics
- Why don't users upgrade their browser?
- You may remember our findings when we looked at why Fx2 users refused to upgrade to Fx3 (reason #1 was related to the Location/Awesome bar). With the 3.0.14 -> 3.5.3 Major Update offer going out this week, we're going to run the same survey.
Evangelism
- Mozilla Developer Center
- Lots of progress on Firefox 3.6 documentation last week, lots more to come this week.
- As always, don't forget to add the
dev-doc-neededkeyword to bugs that may impact developer documentation. You don't even have to wait until there's a patch. - IT updated MDC to MindTouch 9.08.
- See this blog post for more information.
- A bug in 9.08 has broken the language selector pop-up menu; we're pressing MindTouch for a fix.
- A massive, seemingly botted, spam attack led us to disable new user account registration last week until we figure out how they're bypassing the captcha. We're working on this. See this blog post for details.
Labs
Developer Tools
Add-ons
Webdev
L10n
Foundation Updates
- Bugzilla HTTP API deploying this week. Send any comments (and offers of testing) to Gerv.
- Latest mockup for redesigned Getting Involved page has been posted. Comment on the blog post and let us know what you think.