Firefox/Planning/2012-04-25

Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Finch 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

Actions from Last Week

• kbrosnan/cheng to follow up on acrobat mac bustage (does it impact FF12? Are we sure it's adobe-side? Do they know?)
  • It's their problem, they know, but may not fix so we're probably going to extra-document the workaround.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Kilimanjaro

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 12, 10esr)

• We released yesterday!
• Our top new 12 crasher is caused by a new version of Ant Video Downloader (bug 640904), and we're discussing blocklisting
• We'll be throttling later today to analyze feedback
• Desupport add-on hotfix will go out today or tomorrow for Firefox 10-12 users

Beta (13)

• Go to build still incoming for Beta 1, after planned downtime complete
• As of now we will not delay Beta 1 push (planned for tomorrow)

Aurora (14)

• Still on track for Friday push

Nightly (14)

• bug 725408 - implement webapp runtime (launcher and shell) for desktop
• bug 742419 - Implement new identity block design (lighter weight with a generic icon)
• bug 748027 - Make the identity box transparent in more cases
• bug 734373 - Implement Australis toolbar button design
• bug 575561 - External links from within app tabs should always open in new tabs instead of replacing the app tab's page
• bug 711618 - implement basic click to play permission model
• bug 732820 - Cap to the amount of memory used by decoded images
• bug 746055 - Increase image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb so as to avoid doing tons of sync-decodes on pages with many small images
• bug 742776 - Location bar folds case back to history entry, if there's a history entry which is case-insensitively identical to the typed URL
• bug 743819 - Spell checking causes performance degradation in Firefox 10+
• bug 278860 - confusing "profile in use"/"already running" error when profile is missing (not found)

Firefox Mobile

Roadmap

• Aurora build: Friday (4/27)
• Beta build: Tuesday (5/8)
• QA Beta Testday: Friday (5/11)- assuming we can sign off and push to Google Play by thursday.

Exciting highlists

• Tiled upload
• Retained tiles
• low-res screenshot checkerboarding

Services

Apps In The Cloud Backend

• went into production yesterday.
  • props to :rfkelly
  • If you see Services Ops around MV office (they are having a work week), give them a high five

Firefox Sync

• work continues

Add-on SDK

No verbal update today - please see notes

Release (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• All running well

Stabilization (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• Released 1.7b2 yesterday - Please help test it!
• On track to release 15 May 2012

Development (1.8 -> Firefox 13, 14)

• On track to merge to Stabilization 15 May 2012

Identity

Apps

• Firefox Desktop 14 (Nightly) - landed
  • Native Install
  • Chromeless launch of apps
• Firefox Desktop 15
  • In progress of working through Kilimanjaro requirements

• Firefox Mobile 15 - in progress
  • In progress of working through Kilimanjaro requirements
  • Proposed Android solution is to bundle the marketplace with Firefox. - Final review iterations. See bug 738545

• Apps in the Cloud
  • AITC client continues
  • AITC Server - See status above in Services

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• May have broken multiple desktops
• Feedback is low all around since yesterday
• Major thing is norton (I think this is ok now)

Other things worth tracking:

• Crashiness may be up? -- a couple people getting system crashes/blue screens: [1][2]

Mobile

UX & User Research

UX Design

• gave an overview of all the Firefox UX Design projects at the workweek yesterday; will post a link here - sorry it's not here yet!

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Adobe

• Adobe launched http://html.adobe.com/, a single portal that aggregates all the company's efforts to support HTML5
• The Wall Street Journal published an interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen that talks about how the company is "pivoting" to a subscription business model that targets marketers

Apple

• Apple released Safari 5.2 Update 3 to developers. This release features SVG filters, HTML Assets, CSS Filters, the Web Audio API and an improved Web Inspector.

Google

• Google finally released Google Drive, a cloud file storage system. It now serves as the storage interface for the Google App Suite. A REST-based API now allows web application developers to integrate their products with it, and there is now a special section in the Chrome Web Store for it
• Chrome's "Cloud Print" functionality now allows you to print at any FedEx Office location in the U.S., and also allows you to PDF "print" documents directly to a Chrome for Android browser.
• <datalist> support just landed on Chrome Canary
• Google also dramatically raised the bounties it pays for independent researchers for reporting security bugs, raising the maximum amount to $20,000 from $3,133.70
• The long-anticipated trial for Oracle's lawsuit against Google got underway in San Francisco. At the core of the dispute is the question as to whether APIs, apart from source code, are copyrightable.
• CSS Scoped Styles also landed in Chrome Canary
• Google's Ben Goodger posted a clear description of the difference between Aura, a hardware-accelerated UI framework, and Ash, the new ChromeOS window manager. From the description it's clear that some elements of Aura are planned for deployment to other platforms.

Microsoft

• Microsoft confirmed that the Windows 8 Release Preview will be coming out in the first week of June
• Facebook signed an agreement with Microsoft to purchase and cross-license 550 former AOL patents and patent applications. Analysts mused that Facebook purchased the assets in order to better justify and defend moves into different markets after its upcoming initial public offering.

Opera

• Opera, on a quest to deploy the "first true hardware accelerated browser", described how current Opera 12 snapshots are showing improved DirectX hardware acceleration, rather than OpenGL, and will be making it opt-in.
• Also in Opera 12, two Add-on platforms will be removed: Opera Unite and Opera Widgets, as well as support for speech recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML.
• Opera also released a special version of 11.63 for the Mac App store.
• There is also a release candidate for Opera 12

Other

• Majd Taby has posted a detailed overview of all the features in the WebKit Inspector and how they can be best used in mobile application development.
• Long Tail Video posted a summary of HTML5 video support across all the major browsers. Support for key features like tag attributes is nearing ubiquity but support for fullscreen and adaptive streaming is lagging

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox (when Zimbra is back online)

• Chrome for Android to come out of beta
• Opera to implement WebKit prefixes
• Google / Oracle trial on IP in the Android code on-going
• Google started selling hardware in the Play store
• Browser for the S40 series to feature proxy-browsing
• Apple released Q1 sales results
• 760 million forecasted tablet install base for 2016
• Facebook Android app to feature app discovery channels

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Marketing

• Completed release this week, working on final details for Beta and Aurora.
  • Seeing some of our 3.6 EOL work get traction, especially the warnings on the 3.6 about:home page.
• Putting together PMM 'blockers' for Kilimanjaro to add to the pile.
• Starting work on materials for next release cycle.

Press

• Firefox 12 released with UAC-less update system on Windows
  
• Firefox 12 is here, silences annoying Windows UAC warnings
  
• Firefox 12 ushers in automatic updates
  
• Firefox 3.6.x reaches end of life
  
• Firefox Nightly Making Small Changes To Site-Identity
  

Questions, Comments, FYI

• myk: How does one proactively propose disabling a feature that merged to Aurora due to quality/completeness issues?
  • current process for disabling/backing out features is mostly reactive
  • drivers monitor incoming feedback and bug reports and make decisions in response to them
  • here's a proactive process:
    • file a bug requesting feature disablement/backout
    • explain the reasons for the request in the bug description
    • attach a patch that disables/backs out the feature
    • nominate the patch for Aurora via the approval-mozilla-aurora flag

Actions this week