Platform/2009-Q4-Goals

General Goals

• Improve cold startup performance by 30% on windows and mac.
• Deliver out of process plugins for windows.
• Deliver SVG Animations.
• Kill security bugs to under 30 again.
• Reduce crashes to at least parity with pre-3.5.
• ARM Support
  • Add testing infrastructure.
  • Implement crash reporting
• Release Firefox 3.6.

GFX

• Performance: specifically, responsiveness.
  • Create an automated responsiveness/interactivity benchmark.
  • Improve Gecko/Firefox's score on that benchmark substantially (at least 25%).
  • Support and/or participate in the startup time work being done by the Firefox group.
  • Participate in the Electrolysis project by adding support for windowless plugins on Windows.

Win Integration

• Address any Win7 compatibility issues that show up

Layout

• Improve the Web platform by contributing to tests and specifications
  • Publish CSS3 Selectors as CR [fantasai] (done) (backgrounds and borders CR done)
  • Ongoing development of reftest infrastructure for the W3C [fantasai, jwatt] (missed)
• Improve the Web platform by implementing key features
  • Land Harfbuzz prototype integration in tree (allows for richer typographic control, also lays groundwork for performance improvements) [jfkthame] (mostly done, will miss landing)
  • Implement calc() (Web platform) [dbaron] Probably insufficient dbaron resources due to crashkill etc (missed)
  • Support CSS transitions/SVG animation on nearly all CSS values (browser parity) [dbaron, dholbert] (done)
  • Enable SVG Animation with shippable feature set (near-complete CSS property coverage, near-complete SVG attribute coverage, but not necessarily syncbase timing) (Acid3, browser parity) [dholbert, birtles, jwatt] (pathlist and lengthlist done this quarter, finishing off next quarter)
• Improve perceived and measured performance
  • CSS scanner performance analysis and improvements (performance) [zwol] (delayed due to security work) (? maybe a patch end of next week)
  • Implement some kind of lazy frame construction [?] (tnikkel)
  • Compositor phase 2 --- paint and animation control (performance, also add JS animation API to the platform) [roc] Delayed in favour of layers work
  • Implement core layers infrastructure to allow for hardware and multithreaded acceleration [roc] (on track)
• Improve core code architecture to improve stability/performance and reduce cost of future enhancements
  • Simplify frame destruction [fantasai] (waiting for review)
• General product improvement
  • fix scroll position restoration and maintenance (bugs 43114 / 103279) [dbaron] (crashkill victim, also blocked on scroll refactoring)

Video/Audio

• Video on ARM - Theora, 15fps on N900 full-screen [at risk due to hardware unavailability]
• Remove dependency on libfishsound, liboggz, and liboggplay [doublec]
• Experimental implementation of accelerated full-screen video using cairo-gl [kinetik] Obsolete due to layers plan

Mac OS X

• Resolve Mac OS X Java situation for Firefox 3.6.
• Fix any major regressions in 64-bit Mac OS X builds.
• Complete initial performance analysis of 64-bit Mac OS X builds. Should include comparison with 32-bit builds on 10.6 for major benchmarks.
• Fix all known regresssions in Cocoa NPAPI, make it ready to ship.

Content

• Move the web forward by implementing more of HTML5
  • Get our HTML5 history API landed
  • Finish the off main thread parsing work
  • Speculative loading with the HTML5 parser
  • Evaluate what parts, if any, of HTML5 to implement next
  • Rewrite session history to be more like what's specified in HTML5
• Electrolysis
  • Implement JPW (cross process JS wrappers)
  • Get HTTP GET working over IPC
  • Propose a cross process event handling plan
• Improve performance
  • Non-blocking cache writes for page load landed
  • Staying on trace through same origin XOWs
  • Remove the XBL1 CSS based binding mechanism for non-displayed DOM nodes
  • Use our (almost) lock-free data structures for our main event queue
  • Optimize DOM child storage for performance
  • Minimize XPConnect wrapper morphing and the number of XPCOM tearoffs we create from JS
  • Improve DOM event handling performance
• Move the plugin API forward
  • Implement https://wiki.mozilla.org/Plugins:CancelSourceStream

JS

• ES5
  • Complete implementation

• Tracing
  • trace more complex recursion
  • trace switch-statement style emulators

• Performance
  • continue sunspider improvements (within 20% of Chrome 3 on Windows Vista)
  • improve v8 benchmark performance substantially (at least 2x vs. Oct1 trunk)
  • jsval 64-bit representation

• Continue GC redesign
  • GC perf tests
  • see JavaScript:SpiderMonkey:GC Futures

• jsctypes
  • Spec and implement a JS-facing API for handling pointers, structs, and arrays.

Accessibility

• Event handling performance implementation (for DHTML)
  • Code reorganization
  • Implementation of throttling and/or delayed computation and/or smarter caching
  • Crashers
• Fix keyboard support for HTML5 contentEditable
  • Add accessibility support for HTML controls inside of a contentEditable
• Polish table/grid/treegrid accessibility
  • issues with some existing complex DHTML tables (e.g. dojo)
  • vendor reported issues

Multi-Process

• Shippable multi-process Flash, windowed and windowless on Windows (and Linux)
• Complete necko API revisions necessary to support multi-process networking
• Usable prototype of Fennec running multi-process on Linux
• Usable prototype of multi-process Flash on Mac OSX 10.6 (has external dependencies)
• Completed gecko API changes necessary for multi-process session history and link targeting