Platform/2012-12-18

« previous week | index | next week »

Notices/Schedule

• Firefox 18 beta 4 went out the door last week
• Firefox 18 beta 5 will go to build today, be released Friday (get your landings in asap)
• CTP blocks for recent un-blocked versions of Reader/Java/Silverlight going out today (congrats!)
• Firefox 18 Beta 6 will go to build next Thursday, release Friday
• We'll evaluate b6 feedback the week of the 31st, and release the following Tuesday (1/8)

26 bugs (27)	39 bugs (42)
Unresolved Aurora Trackers (non-security, not tracked for Beta)	Unresolved Beta Trackers (non-security)

Key Issues

Actions Last Week

• Milan to assign https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=805745
• Jet look into https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=696640
• Naveed look into https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=817342

Issues

• Win64 builds (bsmedberg)
• Future Issues - early discussion on dev-platform, monitoring for discussion if not resolved
  • MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS removal
  • C++11 atomics
    • https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/BsMJpfWf2ak
  • ICU Import
    • https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/sVVpS2sKODw
• Linux32 support (joduinn)
  • background threads in newsgroups https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.planning/ahyq19APxb4/discussion and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.tree-management/xXAiuCA8k1g/discussion

Actions

• publish summary of linux32 states to dev-planning (coop)
• milan to help with https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=819028

Roundtable

• 2013 Platform Goals
• Meeting Survey Results & Actions
  • Survey Results
    • Overall rating 6/10
    • 93% learned something unexpected
    • General agreement orienting around products is more useful
    • General agreement monthly updates on certain topics are useful
    • General agreement calling attention to key issues helps
    • Sentiment that Metro, Snappy should have less frequent updates
    • Sentiment that Memshrink should have more frequent updates
    • Sentiment that Dev Tools should have its own section
  • Proposed/Possible Changes
    • Put the surprising info and actions first (starting today)
    • Add DevTools back (discuss)
    • Make Snappy, Metro, Memshrink changes (discuss)
      • njn publishes a detailed report of MemShrink activity every two weeks. We can post a summary here every two weeks if people think that would be useful. https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/
    • Written only status updates for platforms, other pieces (discuss)
• Android x86 build support live (no tests yet). Kudos to kmoir. If you see problems, do not hide, please file bugs in mozilla.org:ReleaseEngineering.
• Android NDK upgrade coming
• 4 new rentable branches: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/DisposableProjectBranches#BOOKING_SCHEDULE
• No meeting next 2 weeks

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

• blocking-basecamp. This will only be used up until v1.0 CS (hopefully 1/15), and will ultimately only include those bugs that require Mozilla engineering action prior to v1.0 CS.
• blocking-b2g. This flag is meant to track groups of partner work, without specifying a targeted version. Example values would tef+ for critical issues found after we've deprecated blocking-basecamp, or shira+ for issues blocking a partner's required features.
• tracking-b2g18. This flag is used similarly to tracking-esr17 and is meant to specifically track major stability/security/usability that we'd like to fix int he v1x timeframe. The value can either be set to + (generically tracked) or for a specific 6-week cycle (19+, 20+, etc.). It's been proposed that tracking-b2g-v1x may be a better flag, as it pertains to both Gecko and Gaia.
• status-b2g18. This flag is used similarly to status-esr17 and is meant to track whether a fix has been landed on v1x release branches. It's been proposed that status-b2g-v1x may be a better flag, as it pertains to both Gecko and Gaia.

Firefox Desktop

Per-window private browsing

• on at last in Nightly. Great efforts by ehsan, jdm, folks from Appcoast, and many others.

New "Downloads" view

• Also landed (bug 675902)! It's an important piece of the new downloads UI. Still many performance and polish issues to sort out.

Social multi-provider

• Landed last week (bug 809694)! UX issues and some implementation details to sort out, and still no built-in second provider to test with, but if you're interested in manually adding some for testing, find us on #socialdev.

Mixed content UI

• Work is in progress, tracking bug is bug 815321. Various backend/frontend pieces in active development, UI design is also in progress.

Profiler

• First cut at a webdev-focused frontend landed on mozilla-central. bug 795268
• Please file bugs in Firefox :: Developer Tools.

Firefox Mobile

x86 Builds are Official!

• If santa brings you a Razr i, be sure take a build for a spin
  • http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-android-x86/en-US/fennec-20.0a1.en-US.android-i386.apk
  • http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/gift-guide-motorola-razr-i/

Memory, Responsiveness, Usability

• To reduce memory in our gfx code, let us first improve our visibility into where we are using memory: bug 818060 - Add a memory reporter for graphics textures

Stability Wins

• bug 816164 - gzip-compress crash report submission on Android
• bug 800838 - Android crash in nsNPAPIPluginInstance::UnscheduleTimer @ nsNPAPIPluginInstance::TimerWithID, Fixed for Fx17
• bug 780831 - crash in libdvm.so@0x45... on JB, Uplifted to Fx18

Developer life quality

• bug 811411 -Unit test support (motivated by WebRTC team's need)
• bug 820546 - eliminated unnecessary p of browser chrome files
• bug 818301 - make JimDB work with C++ unit tests

In progress/under investigation

• bug 786996 - Content of Flash plugin is first displayed upside down

Metro [Weekly]

Elm to mc merge

• bug new-packager pretty much done, needs more tests, reviews, and testing.
• bug metro-build pretty much done. needs reviews on remaining blockers.
• bug elm-merge still work to do here: localization issues with metrofx, sec review, landing the rest of the metro code bits that haven't landed already. Remaining patches here can't land until after bug metro-build is on mc.
• Note - test plugin is moving out of (gre)/plugins to (dist)/plugins in bug 817881
• 0 bugs blocking (-7) bug metro-build w/work TBD
• 5 bugs blocking (+0) bug elm-merge w/work TBD

Rel-eng

• Planning to switch mc to the 8.0 sdk after the next merge on ~2013-01-06 bug 774910

Front-end

• Working with UX on polish for bookmarks, start page UI, and session restore.

Stability Report [Weekly]

• We don't have statistics for yesterday's crash data yet, working with the Socorro team to fix that.
  • Backfill in process bug 822724. Intermittent repeated issues on Socorro over the last two weeks, root cause still being investigated bug 819881
• We had a number of regressions on trunk in the last week, but it looks like all the bad things have been fixed right now.
• bug 819028 - crash in the D3D11 DLL shipped with IE10 preview for Win7, needs investigation
• bug 822438 - JS crash on the largest Polish portal, needs help

Mobile

• bug 780831 - crash in libdvm.so@0x45... on JB
  • needs push to beta and then tested on beta

• 17.0 Release top crashes
• 18.0b4 Beta top crashes
• Aurora top crashes
• Nightly top crashes

B2G

• bug 821353 Corrupt stacks from B2G reports - we now know the cause, solution is being worked on.
• bug 821498 Is on file for pending reports

Snappy [Weekly]

• Dec 13 Snappy minutes

Startup & Shutdown

• Thanks to BenWa, we no longer nuke cross compartment wrapper on shutdown, which should save 200ms+ on shutdown (bug 818296)
• Aaron added readahead for safebrowsing .sbstore files, which shows ~50ms improvement on his laptop, probably even more in other environments (bug 810101)
• Rafael moved Telemetry shutdown time probe off of the main thread (bug 815709)
• Vladan is looking into why we have added a gradual 30% regression in start-up times over the past year (bug 818257)

Tab Strip

• Vlad made a huge improvement o animation timing and now it's mostly achieving 60 fps on slow machines (bug 731974)
• James Abbatiello (a new contributor) created a tab switch timing add-on. Details in bug 812381

Content

• Vlad plans to move local storage writes off the main thread this week (bug 807021)
  • Honza is continuing the work on local storage in bug 600307

Games [1st Tuesday of Month]

Mobile Web Compat [2nd Tuesday of Month]

Critsmash [3rd Tuesday of Month]

• Really great recent critical security bug activity; thank you!
• Big push in 2013. Teams are adopting quarterly goals to limit the lifespan of high and critical security bugs.

Memshrink [4th Tuesday of Month]

Engineering Metrics