Firefox/Planning/2012-02-15

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde Conference Room
• irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
• (the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

Video/Teleconference Details - NEW

• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 95312 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312 (US)
• Vidyo Room: Warp Core
• Vidyo Guest URL

REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren't able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Actions from Last Week

• ally to coordinate with greg jost on sync uptake metrics, and measuring the impact of the FF10 usability changes
  • Rolling this one over for a few weeks
• laura to report on the state of persona/personas discussion
• cheng to report back on connection reset issues with SSL
• johnath to wrangle representation in this meeting for identity
  • Emailed and got confirmation that they will start sending representation
  • Added them to the template

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

• 10.0.1 released (unthrottled) last Friday. Release notes here.

Beta (11)

• Next merge date is 3/13
• Beta 3 will be released Friday 2/17.

Nightly (13)

• Snappy
  • Killing Firefox start-up inefficiencies on Windows. Check out the details on Brian Bondy's blog.
  • Most of the cycle collector fixes have landed. Telemetry shows a dramatic reduction in cycle collection times for Firefox 13. Olli and Andrew are investigating the remaining causes of long CC times.
  • Vladan landed a dom storage fix that should reduce the amount of main thread SQL done by content bug 714964.
  • Lots of frontend Telemetry probes are landing (see bug 671038) and already paying off as we caught a tab animation regression in bug 724349.

Firefox Mobile

• Trunk
  • Waiting for OGL layers to land, ETA next week
• Aurora
  • Trucking along with both Native and XUL builds
• Beta
  • Going to ship XUL to the market for all devices until native is ready for prime time
• Release
  • Going to ship XUL 10 ESR until Native finishes its beta cycle

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10 Initial Impact
  • Uptick in traffic to sumo, but no down trend in forums
    • Where can I find the code to add a device to Firefox Sync? 3x (from ui)
    • How do I sync Firefox between my desktop and mobile device? 1.5x (from ui)
    • Increases in 'What's Firefox Sync?' & 'How do I manage my Firefox Sync'
  • Metrics is looking into more quantitative numbers. No ETA yet
• Organizational Changes/Announcements
  • Sync's Dev Ops and Developers have been combined into one team
  • Sync's UX/UI is now owned by Madhava, all other services UX is owned by Bryan Clark. Congrats to both of them
• The next Sync Rapid Release meeting is coming up.
  • If there is something you would like the sync team to work on or a new idea to consider, pitch it there
  • 2pm pst, Feb 28th, vidyo room 'services' please email ally if you would like to be added to the zimbra invite.
• BrowserID+Sync Authentication
  • Warning: The two sync systems will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
• Native Sync
  • Please file bugs. Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
  • We have daily bug triage at 4pm, #androidsync
  • Old news that bears repeating:
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
      • Though some of our contributors may change that!
• Upcoming Releases
  • Addons being sync'ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11 (aka Beta): Addon Sync
  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora (but not Beta)

Add-on Builder

• 1.0 release has been rescheduled for next Wednesday
• Work week for Builder team is next week

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Looking good since last week's hotfix

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Spun 1.5RC2 yesterday
• Still on track to release next week, Feb 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Bay Area Firefox Add-ons meetup Tuesday, February 21 6:00PM PST at the Mozilla SF Offices RSVP Here - join us!

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• The Chromium team expanded the Chromium Security Rewards Program, by increasing its scope to cover the Chromium OS.
• The new Chrome Beta release enables GPU-accelerated rendering of 2D canvas content, and also enables WebGL acceleration for people with older GPUs using Swiftshader, a software rasterizer that Google licensed from TransGaming. This should make for significant performance improvements on systems like Windows XP.
• Chrome's dev channel features an updated V8 Javascript engine that offers initial support for lexical scoping, collections, weak maps, and proxies.
• Google also released a Field Guide to Web Applications that offer a high-level, architectural overview of how to design web applications. Their HTML5Rocks site was updated, and features an excellent detailed overview of the architecture of the Chrome and Mozilla browsers.
• Chrome 17 stable was released. 20 security bugs were fixed -- 1 critical, 8 high, 5 medium, and 6 low. A significant number were detected with AddressSanitizer, a fast memory error detector.
• Chrome's Dev Channel release has a few interesting new features, including using Google's servers to conduct spellchecking for entered and pasted text.
• The Sencha team conducted an initial review of Google Chrome for Android, giving it high marks. It notes that SunSpider performance is little different than other browsers and suggests that it is now time to shelve that particular benchmark test.

Opera

• The latest snapshot of Opera 12 offers support for Do Not Track and a substantial number of SSL performance optimizations.

Microsoft

• Microsoft released a Critical update for MSIE 6, 7, 8, and 9. The vulnerability would allow remote code execution from a specially constructed web page. The update itself had to be updated shortly afterwards after it incorrectly reported that google.com was infected with the Blackhole Exploitation Kit.
• MSIE 10 will allow full support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for XMLHttpRequests.
• In a 9,000 word blog post, Microsoft's Windows president Steven Sinofsky divulged a slew of details on Windows on ARM. Microsoft plans to have ARM PCs available when other Windows 8 computers are available, and the company will also include desktop versions of optimized Office 15 applications. Windows 8 ARM PCs will also never turn off, instead going into a standby mode that should last for weeks.

WebOS

• HP released the source code to Isis, the WebOS browser, which apparently offers "unrivaled speed and standards compliance".

W3C

• Webmonkey has a good summary article describing the issues and positions in the debate as to whether other browsers should support -webkit-prefixed CSS properties.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• The acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google was approved in the US and the EU

• Google plans to test a "next generation personal communication device"

• The Android Market was enhanced with automatic malware scanning for apps

• Android captured 51% of smartphone sales in 2011, iOS 24% and Symbian 12%

• Smartphones represent only 12% of total global handsets in use today, but over 82% of total global handset traffic

• First Intel Medfield-based Motorola handset rumoured to be announced at MWC

• Skyfire raised almost $8 million in a round of funding which was in part sponsored by Verizon

• More details on Windows Phone 8 revealed

• Opera partnered with India's third largest carrier

• Dolphin browser 3.5 was released on iOS

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• New 3.6 Upgrade Billboards went live yesterday (thanks Pascal and L10n!)
• Working on website collateral for next releases
• Display ads continuing for another few weeks
• Starting the blog process for next Aurora and Beta

Mobile

• MWC demo scripts revisions
• Finding agency for FF11 launch programs

Press

• Firefox in 2012: What's in Store for the Open-Source Browser?
  
• Mozilla throws 'freedom' at Microsoft, Google, Apple tanks
  
• Mozilla promises social, privacy-driven Firefox in 2012
  
• Mozilla's plan for 2012: Break the ecosystem lock
  
• Don't Worry, You Won't Be Stuck Using Internet Explorer On Windows 8