WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-30
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Contents
- 1 Friends of the Tree
- 2 Development Updates
- 2.1 Firefox
- 2.2 Gecko
- 2.3 Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
- 2.4 Thunderbird
- 2.5 SeaMonkey
- 2.6 Mobile
- 2.7 IT
- 2.8 Release Engineering
- 2.9 QA
- 2.10 Security
- 2.11 Marketing/PR
- 2.12 Support
- 2.13 Metrics
- 2.14 Evangelism
- 2.15 Labs
- 2.16 Developer Tools
- 2.17 Add-ons
- 2.18 Webdev
- 2.19 L10n
- 3 Foundation Updates
- 4 Roundtable
Friends of the Tree
- Suneel wrote in with these nominations:
- Chris Beard, Myk Melez, and Tomcat for developing and testing Personas extension 1.4 with a better look, and lots of cool new functionality.
- Ryan Doherty and Stephen Donner for pushing version 1.9 of the Personas website and their diligence for readying a redesign for 3.6.
- Seth Bindernagel and Stas Malolepszy for their flexibility and hard work in helping make Personas as accessible in as many languages as possible.
- Harvey and the legal team asked that we recognize Eckhart Wörner as a friend of the tree for his generous donation of several "mozilla" and "firefox" .de domain names.
- Tony wrote, "I'd like to nominate Henrik Skupin (aka whimboo) for FotT this week. He's been thoroughly testing the DLL blocklisting and component whitelisting functionality that has landed in Fx3.6beta 4. This feature is critical to protect users from malware and unwanted dll installations which has led to top crashing issues. A very detailed testplan and results is tracked here, which includes a tedious list of checking top 100 software downloads, manually observing all the .js and .dll files are behaving as expected."
- Marco gives a big shout out for Mick and Jamie from the NVDA project. "NVDA, an open-source screen reader for the blind for Windows, was released last week as version 2009.1 with strong support for Firefox 3.0 through 3.6, and much of this is due to MoFo funding and the great work of Mick and Jamie whose bug reports have lead to good improvements in our accessibility API, strengthening our over-all platform support."
Development Updates
Firefox
( Projects | Status | Goals | People )
- Released Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 on Thursday, Nov 26th in the morning
- if you're working on an add-on that integrates with the new lightweight theme technology, please take note of this late change to the observers/notifications structure
- latest metrics show half of our 400,000+ beta users are running beta 4
- data from these users is helping us ensure a very stable Firefox 3.6 release
- closing on blockers in order to deliver a release candidate build this week
- still aiming to be ready to ship in late December
- mozilla-central will remain restricted to 1.9.2 blockers and approved patches only
Firefox Future
- Blair has posted builds that implement tab matches in the awesomebar
- when the mozilla-central tree re-opens, bsmedberg and the E10s team will be landing out of process plugin work
- Vlad has created an Android Project Wiki for those looking to get involved with porting Firefox to Android using the Android NDK
- Rob Strong is looking at updater fixes for Firefox 3.7 and wants input and feedback
Team News
- we're interviewing for internships with the Firefox team - apply today!
Gecko
- We killed and added blockers over the holiday. 38 remaining blockers for 1.9.2. Watching and fixing regressions & crashes based on beta feedback.
- News from the CrashKill front:
- These numbers are being updated as we get more data from the beta 4 testers. It's really hard to tell if this beta crashes more than beta 3. We'll know more in a few days.
- Reminder: We now have the ability to block specific DLLs from loading. For the list of DLLs we intend to block, see bug 525103.
- Blockers:
- Team blocker numbers:
Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
- Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6
- builds started today
- planning to go to beta this week, after QA spot checks
- on track for mid-December ship date
- Firefox 3.0.17 / Firefox 3.5.7
- schedules posted
- early February release target
- any feedback on these?
- Firefox 3.0.15 -> 3.5.5 Prompted Major Update (PMU)
- overall crashes in 3.5.5 are down from 3.5.3 and 3.5.4 thanks to CrashKill
- some crashes were fixes in our code, others were blocklisted add-ons
- even more fixes coming in 3.5.6
- as a result, we'd like to resume pushing users from 3.0.x to 3.5.x
- planning to go live with a PMU tomorrow morning
Thunderbird
- 3.0rc1 released
- 1 POP3 bug is causing us to consider a 3.0RC2, we hope to have that decided and (ideally) spun today.
- Planning for 3.1 and onward is underway in dev-apps-thunderbird.
SeaMonkey
Mobile
IT
- Trying to hit kernel updates this week
- Working around release schedule, off-schedule downtimes
Release Engineering
- releases for 3.0.16 and 3.5.6 in progress
- another super-quick turnaround for 3.6b4 last week
QA
Test Execution
- Shipped and Tested Fx3.6b4 to Beta
- Major Update testing this week: Fx3.0.15 -> Fx3.6.x & Fx3.5.5 -> Fx3.6.x
- Completed DLL Blocklisting testing, pending a major update test on linux. (henrik)
- Ongoing crashkill analysis. See list of issues that QA is investigating.
Web Dev Testing
- AMO - Testing AMO 5.4 is in progress.Release is scheduled for Dec 8th. Added 6 test cases to developer profile.
- SUMO - Testing of SUMO 1.5 is in progress. Release is scheduled for Dec 3rd.
Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
- Accessibility
- NVDA 2009.1 released! Big shout out to Mick and Jamie for this release. They have been collaborating with the Mozilla Foundation and the A11y team for a long team. They are a MoFo grantee. Their strong efforts have lead to good improvements in our accessibility API, strengthening our over-all platform support.
- Submitted, investigated, reviewed, and verified a number of crashes and regressions. See bug 529442, bug 529371, bug 528311.
- Community
- This Friday, Dec 4th, is a Weave Beta Testday!
- Sent mail out to betatesters, macqa and vistaqa lists requesting testing of 3.6 B4 candidate.
- Successful 1st OpenSource Meetup in Leipzig, Germany last Monday, November 23!
- Localization
- Started the Firefox 3.6 locales testing cycle for 16 key locales.
- Coordinating a testing event with es-MX
Test Development
- We have automated crash testing worker scripts up and running on mac. Linux and Windows are next.
- Electrolysis Talos patches are all in, awaiting review
- Ironing out the last bugs in a unified Fennec/Firefox Historical Log Viewer to help diagnose [orange] bugs (and known failures in Fennec's case) and trends surrounding such failures
Security
- No updates.
Marketing/PR
PR
- Li Gong interviewed for ZDNet Asia piece
- CNET and others cover 2008 Financial news
- Chris Blizzard in GigaOm piece on future of browsers
- Johnathan Nightingale interviewed in WalletPop piece on consumer safety online
- 3.6 Beta 3 and Beta 4 released
Five Years of Firefox
- Mozilla Creative Collective Challenge closing on Dec. 9th. Please get your designs in and vote!
- Last call for "Light the world with Firefox" pictures. Get them in by end of week!
General
- Please join us for the community marketing call this week on Wednesday, Dec 2nd at 10 a.m. PDT/18:00 UTC! Please send Mary (mary at mozilla dot com) any other agenda items. Will start testing Air Mozilla at 9:30 a.m.
- Dial-in Info: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#
- Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. If you're outside the US, use Skype to call in with our toll-free number.
- You can also watch the meeting live in Open Video at air mozilla
- For those that can't make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).
- Notes from the last call here.
Events
- Add-on-Con December 2009, Mountain View, CA. We are sponsoring this event and will have 3 sessions: Taking Flights with JetPack (Aza), Mobile Firefox Add-on Development (Mark Finkle), Future of Add-on Ecosystem (Justin, Nick, add-on developer community member). There will be an Add-ons workshop on Thursday night 12/10 where we will be working on 3.6 and fennec compatibility. Please signup for the Pre-Add-on-Con workshop here.
- Sunlight Labs Great American Hackathon December 12-13, 2009; Mountain View, CA. We will be holding a hackathan at Mozilla HQ on Saturday and Sunday 12/12-12/13. Please signup for the workshop here.
- Foundations of Open Media Software January 13 - 15, 2010; Wellington, New Zealand. Perfect venue to promote open video. We are currently looking into sponsoring this.
- Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2010 January 20-22, 2010; Madrid Spain. We are sponsoring this event.
- SXSW Interactive 2010 March 12-16, 2010; Austin, Texas. Working on sponsorship opportunities and Firefox party. Please continue to check our wiki page for information.
- Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 2010) June 10, 2010; Toronto, Canada. We are sponsoring this event.
Support
- No updates this week.
Metrics
- Today is Cyber Monday. Historically we’ve seen a usage spike on this day... we’ll publish some numbers if we see something similar today.
- User Outreach
- Published findings based on user comments from the Firefox Update/Whatsnew page. Top comment was “Firefox is great”.
- But we also saw two points of frustration from users: (1) crashiness, and (2) Firefox not saving a user’s settings. We previously saw this latter issue and a fix will be shipped in the next release of Fx.
Evangelism
- New hacks post on CSS gradients
- Lots of other posts coming up as well this week - help with spreading the word if you can!
Labs
Developer Tools
- No updates this week.
Add-ons
- Firefox 3.6 compatibility up to 59%
- AMO 5.4 launches next Tuesday with support for release channels, better localization support when browsing, and GetSatisfaction integration
- Add-on-Con is next Friday, with a pre-conference workshop the night before at Mozilla HQ
Webdev
"Updates are in the wiki" :)
- Legal updates for mozilla.com
- Socorro 1.2 code freeze is tomorrow, launch is 12/3
- AMO 5.4 launches 12/8
- SUMO 1.5 launches 12/3
L10n
Products
- Firefox presently has 72 "green" locales and we are still accepting changes to those green locales
- Missing locales are Mongolian, Occitan, and Kurdish
- Fennec presently has 32 "green" locales" and we are accepting any changes until code freeze, which is scheduled for 11:59 PM PST on December 1.
- Opt-in for Fennec requires localizers to check the search plugin patch in each locale that Stas provided for last week. Please approve and land.
Web l10n
Other
- Get Personas website should be ready for l10n this week
- Weave Sync is getting closer to needing l10n, drivers will work with Weave Sync team to coordinate
- Pike and Gandalf's sign-off application is in progress
Foundation Updates
- Over 1,000 people have contacted us about contributing to Mozilla through the new Get Involved page over the last month. If you're interested in bringing new people into your project, please contact david at mozillafoundation dot org.
- Today is the last day to get your submission in for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge.