Firefox/Planning/2011-07-20

Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde Conference Room
• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 8605 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8605 (US)
• irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
• (the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

Actions from Last Week

• Asa to write up a post-facto feature page on async plugin painting on mac

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 5.0)

• 3.6.20 code freeze is August 1st
  • Will ship at the same time as Firefox 6
• Lion shipped today, we should be good with 5.0.1
  • Looking for more issues
  • We know that using Java on 3.6 on Lion causes a browser freeze
    • Will be fixed in 3.6.20
    • Living with it as the Lion early adopters not using Firefox 5+ and using Java is thought to be small

Beta (6)

• Offered the update last week
• Will send a (non-urgent) go to build today or tomorrow

Aurora (7)

• Offered the update last week
• Haven't done the add-on compatibility bump on AMO yet
• Builds only happen when there are changes during the day (yay RelEng!)
  • Christian is blogging on the channels blog about this today
• Looks like Azure canvas will stick.

Nightly (8)

• Migration is 4 weeks away.
• Firefox starting up with multi-process landed to m-c: set pref "browser.tabs.remote" to true to try it out!

Firefox Mobile

5

in Android Market and Ovi Store: Total downloads: 2,847,002 (+3.95%) Android Market Active Installs: 1,185,896 (+3.72%) Market rating: 3.4 5/4/3/2/1: 10541/5961/5309/3989/5117

Add-Ons: Reviewed/Public: 167 (+1) Compatible: 31 (5.0-8.0a1) Featured: 20

• Low compatible add-ons count

6

Beta 2 launched last week Total downloads: 126,036 (+16.81%) Android Market Active Installs: 51,934 (+15.73%) Market rating: 3.6 5/4/3/2/1: 533/343/241/145/211

7

in Aurora - last Release for Maemo, goal: publish Aurora on Android Market

8

in Nightly

Action Items from last meeting

• What's in our releases: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Triage and What's coming (also: see http://bit.ly/fennecroadmap)
  
• Aurora on Android Market (drive decision) -
  
  • Legal clearance: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669929
    
  • Suggestion: call Application "Aurora" (not Firefox Aurora), add "Firefox" in the description.
    • Christian points out that doesn't jive with the brand matrix
  • Give marketing 30 days before we put anything new in the Android Market

New ACTION ITEMS

Mobile Test Pilot - HELP TEST! - http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/mobiletestpilot

Maemo support: Fx7 will be final release

Localization

• Status quo for the multi-locale dashboard (live link)
• chofman: populations and status of the marketing list of top tier mobile languages/countries: https://intranet.mozilla.org/L10n/Mobile
  
  

Release Engineering

• Shutting off mozilla-2.0 automation?
• Not generating aurora builds or updates if no code or localizations have changed
• Mobile
  • Mobile priorities page
  • localized Marketplace promo text still an issue bug 663984
  • bug 669189 in Android marketplace lets Fennec be installed on incompatible devices - happening to other apps also
  • What's New text (localized?) for every release? (500char max)

QA

• testplan for Firefox 6 features is complete
  • working on cleanup and organization of feature pages
  • Beta 2
    • Work has started on testing, target ship date?
  • Beta 3 target date?
• started tracking Firefox 7 features and creating test plans for those features
  • QA/Fennec/7

Marketing & PR

• Firefox Gone Mobile - SF & London - great success! Report from Wilson/Dan coming soon
  
• Mobile Add-Ons campaign for Fall
• Q3: no big campaigns, focusing on optimizing existing channels to drive usage
• Android Market description update and optimization w/ Irina

Headlines

• The history of Mozilla and Firefox

• Mozilla re-establishes Enterprise Working Group
• Mozilla Formulates Enterprise User Working Group to Address Enterprise Needs
• Mozilla Offers Olive Branch to Enterprise With 'Working Group'

• A New Technology to Battle Website Password Fatigue
• Mozilla BrowserID for Firefox, IE, and Chrome does away with logins
• Mozilla's BrowserID Aims to Eliminate Password Fuss

• Firefox Is Going 64-Bit: What You Need To Know
• Mozilla Set Goals for Firefox Multi-processing Support

UX and Design

• UX workweek in Toronto this week
  • working/revising through Brian's tablet draft specs
  • series of blog posts on this starting tomorrow
• madhava to follow up on readability email sent out (you know who you are, brad and doug)
  • see Matt's in progress specs for readability options in Design section of Fennec/Features/readability
• ongoing work on android widget, webapp creation (some detail in a feature page) -- talking to apps team about resourcing

Research

Got great feedback on Firefox Home.

Have your friends and family sign up up to do some user testing on upcoming mobile studies.

Next Wednesday - Users in da House - 2pm-4pm PST

Market Insights

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Dolphin HD released v6.0, a new logo and announced $ 10 million in funding from Sequoia
• Opera announced a 3-year extension to its global agreement to Vodafone and a partnership with Motorola to have Opera Mobile bundled on the Motokey XT device in Brazil
• Android is now growing at a rate of 550,000 activations per day and has a v2.3 SDK with tablet optimization features
• Qualcomm released a mobile browsing benchmark called Vellamo
• Apple announced a strong last quarter, when it sold 33.4 million iOS devices and expanded its international reach

More Info

• Project Plan Update and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases
  
• Updated: Android Device Compatibility Criteria Spreadsheet
  
• Mobile Demos: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/mobiledemos
  
• Mobile Eng Team: Master Sheet  (<-- this is our single source of truth; request access if you can't view the doc)
• Cross-project feature and release documentation (derived from our Master Sheet):
  
  • Flight Tracking: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Flight_Tracking#Mobile
    
  • Feature List: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Mobile
    
  • Feature Pages: linked from Feature List
    
  • New Feature Pages for all ideas features that are related to projects outside of mobile: go here
    
  • Roadmaps: Firefox for mobile | Firefox Home

Firefox Sync

• Beta (6) - Sync Discovery
• Aurora (7) - Instant Sync
• Firefox Sync Add-on EOL Plan - Phase 1 - in progress
• Firefox 8+:
  • Improving Sync Set Up on Desktop - In progress
  • Improving Sync Set Up on Mobile - In progress

Add-on Builder

• Freezing this Friday, release next Wednesday - hopefully this will be the last 2-week bug clean-up round
  • Finally tracked down the ghost-in-the-machine bug that was causing roughly 1/10 add-on test calls to hang in our add-on packaging queue for a looooong time. It was a third-party vendor lib that we use in AMO, we'll be discussing possible fixes today.
• Moving on to AMO API integrations next dev cycle
• Need to figure out when we are going to make the push to transition the Builder to an open web app, will talk to Ragavan this week.
• In case you didn't see our new 12 month roadmap, you can check it out here: Add-on Builder Roadmap

Add-on SDK 1.1

• progress continues apace on a variety of enhancements and bug fixes
• last chance for feedback on proposed new Jetpack/Development Process!
  • post feedback to Jetpack thread or dev.planning thread
• initial drafts of feature pages for future development are almost done
• dcm to start soliciting feedback on those soon (next week?)

Input 4.3

• No ETA; working on IT blockers for getting metrics elasticsearch cluster up first
• Will be in semi-maintenance mode for the quarter shoring up the app (WebDev resources divided with Mozillians.org), while working more on getting insights from the current system as it is now with Metrics and other teams.

Other notes:

• Getting close to a working extension for feedback on specific add-ons
• Working with the BMO team on defining a set of requirements to allow folks to file bugs into Bugzilla via an option on Input

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Feedback by version:

1. 3.6/4.0 traffic (older)
   • Pretty much the only thing is that Firefox 4 users are wondering if they can avoid the update to Firefox 5 and 3.6 users are wondering if they can get Firefox 4 rather than 5.
     • https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/845716
2. 5.0 or current release. -- Cheng
   • Extensions (Mainly Google Toolbar, IDM)
     • Google toolbar is now officially unsupported.
   • Hotmail changed so that it won't remember your password (other bug about not reading email was fixed and seems to have mostly died away).
     • https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/847972
     • I got a link from the hotmail team about this.
   • App-Tabs aren't saving
   • PDFs don't open (caused by incompatible extensions/plugins?)
     • https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/851305
     • https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/838551
     • https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/837863 (can't make PDFs)
   • Proxy settings are resetting on shutdown -- maybe malware + user.js (?)
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?q=proxy&product=firefox&version=5.0&date_start=2011-07-12
     • https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/851746 (and others)
3. 6.0:
   • Crashy/Freezing/Slow
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?q=crash&product=firefox&version=6.0&date_start=2011-07-12&date_end=&sentiment=sad
   • Extensions extensions (mostly AV companies)
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=6.0&q=add-ons
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=6.0&q=extensions
   • Maybe more people have log-in issues
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=6.0&q=log+in
   • We may have broken hindi or thai:
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&version=6.0&date_start=2011-07-12&sentiment=sad&q=hindi and http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=6.0&q=thai
4. Aurora (Features)
   • Memory Usage (25)
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=7.0a2&q=memory
   • Firefox Sync
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=7.0a2&q=sync
5. Aurora (Issues/Bugs) - (969 Issues)
   • auto apply 7.0a2 update everyday, despite the fact that I've already done the update
   • Facebook, eBay, and several other websites that use a lot of Java (I think it's Java) aren't working with Aurora currently.
   • Tabs (72) (mainly App Tabs Issues)
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&version=7.0a2&date_start=2011-07-11&sentiment=sad&q=tabs
   • Add-ons Incompatibility (260)
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&version=6.0&date_start=2011-07-12&sentiment=sad&q=add-ons
   • Google Toolbar (14)
     • http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=firefox&sentiment=sad&date_end=&date_start=2011-07-12&version=7.0a2&q=toolbar

Mobile

Press & Public Reactions

• The history of Mozilla and Firefox

• Mozilla re-establishes Enterprise Working Group
• Mozilla Formulates Enterprise User Working Group to Address Enterprise Needs
• Mozilla Offers Olive Branch to Enterprise With 'Working Group'

• A New Technology to Battle Website Password Fatigue
• Mozilla BrowserID for Firefox, IE, and Chrome does away with logins
• Mozilla's BrowserID Aims to Eliminate Password Fuss

• Firefox Is Going 64-Bit: What You Need To Know
• Mozilla Set Goals for Firefox Multi-processing Support

Questions, Comments and Highlights

• For when do we plan the last beta build off of the beta repos? aka, what's the target date for l10n of Firefox 6 desktop/mobile
  • Christian said August 3rd (tentative)
• (bsmedberg) Status of Windows 64-bit prioritization? I still think this should be very low priority, but I wonder if there is a feature page or an explicit prioritization decision has been made. (asa) Feature page is here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Special:FormEdit/Feature_Page/Features/Desktop/Windows_7_64_bit and dev.planning post coming up with the Product Team's views.
• Johnath wrote a blog post about release timing
• Christian asks if we've seen an impact on mobile (more bugs, more feedback, faster fixes) after the push for Mozilla employees to run Android
  • We are seeing a bit of growth on Nightly and Aurora. 222 ADU on Nightly, 91 ADU on Aurora (up from 172 and 55 one month ago, and still growing). Note: That's not short for 91,000 users - it's just ninety-one users, period.
  • Please run builds and file bugs. But we also need to reach beyond employees if we really want meaningful testing on Nightly and Aurora.
• Christian wants to know if we should put something in 3.6.20 to deal with Google Toolbar and updates
  • We note that the EOL announcement was anemic at best
  • Google's still offering it for download in places
  • Users trying to update from 3.6 to 5+ may think it will eventually become compatible and wait
  • If we are going to do something in product, we need it on 3.6 and 3.6.20 is the vehicle
  • If we are going to do something in product, we have very little time as 3.6.20 code freeze is soon (especially if localization is involved)
  • Christian will organize a meeting with product, support, and kev. Others interested can email Christian to get on the invite

Actions this week

• Johnathan to re-template this meeting to extract out common elements, Thomas to review
• Asa to post about the product team's view of 64-bit support and update the group here