Firefox/Planning/2013-04-17

Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PT, 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# 99696 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 99696 (US)
• Vidyo Room: ProductCoordination
• Vidyo Guest URL

Actions from Last Week

• Unlikely, since last week's meeting was cancelled!

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Current Releases

Beta (133)

• 21.0b3 went to build yesterday, last beta for taking speculative fixes goes to build Tues April 23rd in the morning

Aurora (54)

Nightly (134)

Firefox Metro

Firefox Mobile

Current Releases

We re-spun 20.0.1 to remove MP banner and was able to include a couple of good stability improvements:bug 858561, bug 859425

Beta (133)

• Released beta 2 build 2 over the weekend (<3 relman and QA): https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Fennec/21/Beta/2-build2
• Currently qualifying Beta 3: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Fennec/21/Beta/3

Aurora (54)

Nightly (134)

• We busted our updater for Nightly but it is fixed now bug 860454 the good news is that we were able to test out Product Announcements to that channel. Noted Ben's note about about pinging RelEng next time to help avoid stranding folks
• \o/ About:Home content is now displaying correctly thanks to bug 838793
• WebRTC is building by default bug 835716 - Enable building of WebRTC on Android by default
• A large chunk if New Layout and Styles was pushed bug 823644
• Domain Auto-Complete also landed bug 858340
• Good progress on SkiaGL
• Happy Reader-Mode changes: bug 814587, bug 784387, bug 857989
• A bunch more reflow-on-zoom improvements landed:bug 803719,bug 836565,bug 800805
• Good stability wins: bug 859100, bug 859031

Big <3 to constributors

• capella fixed bug 848267 - Awesomebar loses correct tab selection
• Justin Busby fixed bug 755240 - Scrolling axis lock is unbreakable (his first patch!!!)
• David Hsu fixed bug 861205 - Add a fuzzyEquals helper to browser.js (also his first patch!!!)

Services

Firefox Health Report

• Working well on Beta, the board remains green for shipping in 21
• Web-served report will get a small set of fixes prior to ship, talk to mconnor or lco with any requests _today_

Product Announcements / Home Page Snippets (Android)

• Initial requirements gathering and planning happening, see rnewman/kar for details.

Developer Tools

• work continues on the network monitor bug backlog
• msucan landed the browser console and is refining it to make it more useful
• scratchpad is getting integrated with the debugger
• Jetpack is closing out a bunch of PWPB work and may politely request Beta uplift for a small patch today

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 20 General 4.1/5 stars

TLDR: Most users are quite happy with FF 20. There are intermittent reports of slowness, perf, and addon issues.

Positive:

• No other browser this week has allowed me to log in to my college campus so I could work online to complete my assignments other than Firefox.Firefox is the ONLY BROWSER That Works for me!! :) Thank you..
• It's simplicity - no distractions or flashy messages on the front page, and it's so easy and fast to use
• I like it better than google. It seems faster and lists places to go on the bottom that I don't have to type them in. Keep up the good work.
• i don't know much about computers but i have been using Firefox for at least six years and find it to be the best for me, its fast and easy to use and for me its just right/ thank you Firefox

Negative:

• takes lot of RAM. I expect FF to load pretty fast with a very low mem requirements.
• I like every thing about Firefox except crashes a lot. I like the new features, I can tell it is getting faster and the crashes seem to happen less.

Private browsing: 4.0/5 stars

TLDR: Used regularly 58% of the time, rarely/never 42% of the time. Still a lot of confusion over what it does but almost everyone says positive things.

Positives:

• I used Chrome for private navigation and Firefox for day to day stuff.
• Finally i will be able to dump Chrome for good! Hoorray!
• I like that that now the private browsing function opens up another window leaving the original in tact. In general it looks and feels great, not sure really how helpful i can be.
• LOVE THIS FEATURE

Some (minor) pushback:

• You have changed things at the bottom of tools, and over in File you put in a New Private Window. I liked tools just the way it was and did not know that you were going to make this drastic change. I have been trying to back to version 18 or 19 to get tools back the way it was. I would be happy if you could put me back to tools the way it was. Enough said..........
• I am still on the fence about the changes to "Private browsing". I think I might have preferred the all or none approach before. I don't understand the reason for the change, but can live with it.

Download Manager: 3.8/5 stars

TLDR: Mostly positive. The negatives are from users that either didn't see a reason to change the feature or just have suggestions for improving the Download Manager.

Postive:

• I like it, because it makes it easier than having a separate window just for downloads.
• Its much easier to use...thank you
• its about time you guys changed it. the new one is absolutely brilliant!
• Keep on doing what you're doing. If I can understand it, anybody can. Thx Firefox ;-)

Negative:

• I didn't see anything wrong with the way it was.
• Did it NEED to be changed?
• May just have to get used to it. Old ways sometimes die hard :)

Feature Suggestions:

• There needs to be a button to quickly clear the recently downloaded files, not just through the "Show all downloads" window.
• I'd like it more if you added a pause/resume button to the left of the open containing folder button
• It only shows bar & remaining, I will very much love it if it will show the download speed in first click.

Mobile

No Updates. Feedback is all green with no major issues.

User Experience (Design & Research)

• UX was on an offsite last week
• no update this week - more next week!

Market Insights from the Product Marketing Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

Canonical

• Canonical, some press analysts say, is doing well at encouraging independent developers to port their Android applications to the Ubuntun Mobile platform.

Google

• Google forked WebKit creating a new engine called Blink. While Google is able to remove "7 build systems, more than 7,000 files and 4.5 million lines", the WebKit community is also cleaning house.
  • Over the last year, Google contributors made around half of commits to WebKit, so the WebKit community is now in the process of reprioritizing and identifying code areas that are now unmaintained. Significant portions of the WebKit codebase that require new owners include the Web Inspector, File System API and CSS Variables.
  • Google posted a video where lead developers answer community questions about Blink. Google says they "have no plans" to change the format of the user agent string.
  • Opera has confirmed that it will use Blink. Yandex's browser will as well.
  • Google's Alex Russell blogged about how it will allow the Chrome web platform development team to iterate faster. Justin Schuh described the security features that will likely be coming.
• Chrome 27 Beta was released. Web content appears 5% faster, the Chromium team now uses benchmarks from webpagetest.org in their testing, a "simple, elegant user interface" for month, week, and date <input> types, live, low-latency audio support for the Web Audio API, the Sync FileSystem API for Chrome Apps, and other improvements.
• Chrome now has a regularly-updated, detailed, feature dashboard for web platform work.
• Chrome for Android now syncs passwords and autofill entries for logged-in users.
• In likely effort to better support emerging markets with poorer bandwidth, select videos on YouTube are now available at a 144p pixel video resolution
• Google acquired Behavio, a startup that uses mobile sensors to collect data and predict user behavior. Funf.org is an open-source version of the approach.
• Google is about to place a "Chrome Apps" bookmark in every Chrome user's bookmark bar.
• ChromeOS is getting a virtual keyboard, no doubt part of the early steps for having the operating system run on tablets.
• Chrome Beta for Android and Chrome for iPhone and iPad now support full screen browsing. Chrome Beta for Android also features improved handling of search terms in the URL bar, and reporting on the data savings obtained from the browser's new SPDY-based data compression feature.
• Chrome for Business can now be centrally configured by administrators, and be configured to revert to another browser for specific in-house applications

RockMelt

• RockMelt has removed their RockMelt browser from the market, deciding to concentrate on their web curation product.

Microsoft

• Microsoft released another attack in its "Scroogled" campaign, describing how the Google Play store passes users' personal information to app developers.

Mobile

• Chrome Beta for Android was updated to feature fullscreen support, a view of the user's search terms in the Omnibox (location bar) and information with regards to how much data was saved through the data compression feature. Chrome for iOS was also updated with support for printing.

• At the end of 2013 there will be 1.58 billion smartphones in use worldwide, according to The Yankee Group. Of those, 833 million will run Android, 357 million iOS, 158 million will be Blackberrys, 137 million will be on Symbian, 76 million on Windows Phone, and 20 million on other OSs.

• Eric Schmidt quotes at Dive into Mobile:
  • On Android: "320 operators, 160 countries, 700,000 apps in the Play Store and 1.5 million activations of Android every day. We'll cross a billion towards the end of the year. Android is the primary vehicle of smartphones - we'll quickly get to the $100 price point, which is the key for the next five billion people looking to get connected."
  • On local content: "In the developing world, we're getting products launched with pre - loaded content in native languages."

• Hon Hai, the parent of Foxconn, who produces more than 40% of the world's consumer electronics and a significant share of smartphones, has signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft to address infringement issues created by Google's Android and Chrome operating systems. The manufacturer will pay royalties for those OEM clients that have not signed a deal with Microsoft. The Redmond company already has agreements with most of the big handset vendors, such as Samsung, HTC and LG.

• Amazon will be expanding the availability of its Android app store to nearly 200 countries, from the 7 where it was previously active. In the past the extension of the app store in new countries preceded launches of Kindle tablets.

• The most lucrative app monetization method is represented by royalties from preloading of the app (with average revenue of $4,385 / app / month), followed by licensing fees from distributors, commissioned apps and subscriptions. Advertising and pay per download feature the lowest in Vision Mobile's developer survey on app economics. Among operating systems, iOS continues to lead the chart as most lucrative platform (average revenue of $1,880 / app / month), followed by Windows Phone and Android.

• In the US, 4G and no - contract plans are fastest - rising motivators for purchase of a smartphone, according to a study by Google and Compete. 1 in 3 people select a phone first, then a carrier and 66% consider 2 or more phone models. 47% of purchasers look at 2 or more carriers (a 193% increase Year - over - Year) and 1 in 3 purchasers have switched carriers.

• Microsoft, Nokia, and a number of top developers have filed a formal complaint to the European Union against Google's use of its apps in Android. The accusation is of using Android " as a deceptive way to build advantages for key Google apps in 70 percent of the smartphones shipped today". This comes at a time when the European Union is in the final stages of an inquiry into the search offering of the company.

• New version distribution numbers for Android put Gingerbread at 39.8%, Ice Cream Sandwich at 29.3% and Jelly Bean at 25%. The next version of Android, Key Lime Pie, is expected to be unveiled at Google I/O in May.

• Today, an average US consumer spends 2 hours and 38 min a day on a phone or tablet, according to Flurry Analytics. 80% of the time is spent on apps and 20% (31 minutes) is spent on the Web. Games are the largest category in terms of time spent (32%), followed by Facebook with 18%. On iOS, the browser, Safari, comes on the third place, with 12%.

• The Google Play Store was re - designed to optimize for discovery of entertainment content.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Firefox May Drop Support for <blink> Tags, Finally
• Mozilla adds Cliqz, msnNow and Mixi as social providers to Firefox
• Future Firefox to Offer More Social, Privacy Choices

• We're currently wrapping up the Firefox Desktop Q2 & Q3 go to market plans - will share wider starting next week
• In honor of Poetry Month our social media channels asked our followers for Firefox inspired poems. Some top picks:

Questions, Comments, FYI

• FYI tree closure Sunday ~1000-1400 PT for SCL3 firewall work bug 862956

Actions this week