Compatibility/Mobile/2013-08-26

• Mobile Web Compatibility Meeting - 2013-08-26
• Minutes: Previous 2013-08-19

Meeting: Mobile Web Compatibility Weekly
Agenda: 26 August 2013 Mobile Web Compatibility meeting
Chair: Karl Dubost
Scribe: lmandel, kdubost
Regrets: Brad, 

Topic: previous meeting, next meeting

Next meeting: The next meeting will be on September 9, 2013. (September 2 is a day off in Canada and USA)

Topic: Welcome Mike Taylor (lmandel)

Introduction of Mike by Lawrence

• lawrence: Mike is coming from Opera.
• Mike: Worked from Texas. My last day at Opera was on Friday. I was previously on Web standards team. Before I was a Web opener, doing a lot of outreach and a bit of Analysis.
• lawrence: Mike will have the same role than Hallvord

Topic: Success Criteria for Web Compatibility (lmandel)

How do we show what we do is useful (is it?)? How do we better explain what we do and set the right expectations?

• Hallvord: simple metrics are better. "sites improved since [date]" count. "Community actions" count.
• lawrence: The senior level is looking at staffing. We could adopt a UA like iPhone on our platform. Short wins, but That also creates issues. So we need to find out success criteria. The idea of swapping the UA is coming time to time. It's too early to measure if the current project is a success or a failure. If we get to this point (TO DEFINE), we can access success. So in 6 months time, we should be articulate our measure of success. How many sites respond? What did we fix? Please contribute your ideas?
• kdubost: It would be unfortunate, but would should be prepared to come up with the answer "We have to change the UA string."
• hallvord: It might be interesting to define how many Web sites which are failing depending on the UA. I'm planning to rewrite the Arewecompatibleyet interface, I would like to get rid of the meta bug approach. Add in simpler metrics, ways we really demonstrate to the community how this work is useful.

Another metric (measuring real-world impact) is %age of top-x-sites that have open evangelising bugs.

• lmandel: just move forward with it. Don't bother about me.
• kdubost: Can we have variations on the user agent to see what is working or not?
• hallvord: I tried to improve the automated testing so that it becomes trivial to test and automatically detect bugs. Once we reached that level we can tweak parameters more easily.
• miketaylr: number of libraries we patched, we fixed. It has larger effects than just Web sites.
• lmandel: Yes it is important also to show that we fix some big sites too or with large impact. It gives context.

Please suggest things by the end of this week.

Topic: Better relations with Partners (kdubost)

We need to create a short guide on Web Compatibility issues. I assigned myself an Action Item but your input is more than welcome.

• Karl: When internal Mozilla people start negotiating with external partners, partners may be dissapointed that Firefox OS is not widely recognized as mobile. OEMs don't want to deliver a poor UX. Not everyone in Mozilla is a geek. How can we help the non geeks understand Web compatibility? Why failures and how to fix? Should we have documentation?
• Karl: First part of guide should be high level - why it fails.
• Karl: 3 parts of Web compatibility: MoCo, Mozilla community, and partners.
• lmandel: We need to make it clear to our partners to help them understand how it fails and how they can help us with the outreach.
• Karl: I will start this work and am looking for help.
• lmandel: Start on the wiki. Our partners are already used to it. We can request the creative team to help with any gfx.

Topic: meeting agenda (kdubost)

I will try to send the meeting agenda on Friday so people have more to explain what they work on.

• Karl: I want the agenda to be driven by the team, not just me. Please post your items to the agenda throughout the week.

Topic: Pulling changes for B2G 1.1 (lmandel)

We still have a window for it. Need a new bug? See Bug 905237

• lmandel: Some partners will pick up changes for 1.1. It's worth doing a new bug and commit a big change.

Topic: Testing of the sites we spoof on (hallvord)

How well tested are sites with the current spoofs? How can we improve coverage?

• hallvord: is it possible to get better test coverage?
• lmandel: Maybe you could propose something for it. In the past we took the 100 Top Alexa sites. We tested for different User Agent string. Maybe we can use the same QA group used in the past, or maybe used a different method.
• miketaylr: What do you mean exactly by more coverage?
• hallvord: Automatic coverage is pretty exicting but we need sometimes user interactions to be able to understand if it's working. A human person sitting 1hour with a site and test it. We could have automatic per site notification.
• lmandel: I don't think we have per site evaluation for privacy reasons. Explaining the value of the site is important, a mobile site sending only a banner for downloading an app for Android is not really useful to get the Mobile Web site. These are good points.
• kdubost: You could use this section of the guide for documenting the different type of testing we can do. And what are the issues.
• miketaylr: Are there automation tools?
• jsmith: you can use marionette

Topic: how pro-active should we be on contacting sites? (hallvord)

"Analyse issues and wait for community members to contact sites" vs "contact any site on any issue" - where should we aim for?

• Karl: Have been doing a lot of analysis. More important to leverage effort of community than solving things by ourselves. Need to see what kind of pushback there is from the community about materials. What will there reaction be?
• lmandel: We can't do everything. We need to move forward and try to engage the community at the same time. We are the support team that makes it easy for other people to reach out the Web site.

Topic: Developer Challenge with Device/Model Info in UA (jsmith)

Recent situation happened where the HERE Maps was working fine until device information was added into the user agent. When it was added, l10n regressions were seen. The developer raised concerns about being unable to test out the device information being present to see if their app works under the device-specific UA. How do we allow for accessible testing of user agents that contain device information? Bug 873372

• lmandel: do you know how the user agent break it?

jsmith: see the bug lmandel: is this being fixed? Some UA detection schemes will be busted because of the device information. jsmith: How do they deal with different devices information? lmandel: let's provide the documentation and maybe in the future a framework for spoofing and testing what is happening for their app.

Update on Video sites? (hallvord)

Hallvord is starting a project to work on video sites based on the bugs that are in bugzilla. lmandel: anything new to share hallvord: It is stucked my firefox OS device broke. Maybe the support of geeksphone will help.

Topic: Work This Week

What will you be working on during the next week?

• blassey:
• hallvors: maybe AreWeCompatibleYet improvements - aiming for killing most [META]-bugs
• jsmith:
• kdubost: Focusing on the Web community effort. Some articles to write and Web sites contact.
• lmandel:
• miketaylr: Learning everything (perhaps including Marionette).

Topic: Web Compatibility Progress

This week bug for the new batch of modifications on ua-override-prefs.js is Bug 905237 (Previous was Bug 902604)

• Bug 908392 - vg.no (FIXED)
• Bug 827666 - slideshare.net (FIXED)
• Bug 878266 - i-dizajn.com (INVALID)
• Bug 905860 - kohls (WORKSFORME)
• Bug 827624 - pontofrio.com.br (INVALID)

Some new things to watch

• Bug 908193 - slideshare.net
• Bug 907674 - ehow.com
• Bug 908391 - www.aftenposten.no
• Bug 907059 - sina.com
• Bug 909420 - Library PHP WPTouch to fix

Requires investigation

• Bug 907371 - HuffingtonPost social links are images in the stock browser, letters in Firefox

Tracked Actions

ONGOING

• TODO-20130715-01: kdubost have a panorama of tools used by Web developers for testing. Write a post about it.
• TODO-20130729-01: kdubost To draft ideas around a tool for doing the Ébauche in Web Compatibility testing. Think about kind of YSlow report for Web Compat. Enter the URI, and get a simple report of potential issues. Could be useful for helping with bug reporting.
• TODO-20130805-02: hallvord to test in bulk if Web sites are still working with a device information into the UA string Firefox OS. (Bug 901039)
• TODO-20130806-01: kdubost to create a script to automatically compile stats from Tech Evangelism - Mobile. See email.
• TODO-20130819-01 kdubost to create a first workflow for Web Badges for the community with Carla Cassili
• TODO-20130819-03: lmandel to follow up with Gerv about posting UA device/model recommendations on MDN.
• TODO-20130822-01: kdubost to write an article on hacks.mozilla.org about UA detection techniques and their consequences. - deadline: 20130830
• TODO-20130826-01: kdubost to create an intro guide to be ready to participate to Web Compatibility effort.
• TODO-20130826-02: kdubost to create 101 on Web compatibility issues so Mozilla employes have handy materials to discuss with partners.
• TODO-20130826-03: kdubost to create a new bug and a Pull Request for all changes on B2G 1.1

DONE

• TODO-20130812-01 kdubost to analyze Web sites from Venezuela DONE
• TODO-20130812-02 kdubost to analyze Web sites from Columbia DONE
• TODO-20130819-04: lmandel to test pandora.com from the USA. DONE
• TODO-20130819-02: hallvord to open a bug for having a proxy setting in the UI. 909498 DONE