Firefox/Planning/2011-09-28

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Planning Meeting Details

  • Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
  • Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
  • Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde Conference Room
  • irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
  • (the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

Video/Teleconference Details - NEW

  • 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 95312 (US/INTL)
  • 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312 (US)
  • Vidyo Room: Warp Core
  • Vidyo Guest URL
REMEMBER
These notes are read by people who weren't able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.


Actions from Last Week

  • Sheila to come back on bug 687991 -- crashes on alice.it without stack
    • Fixed another bug so we could get the crash reports. Crash only showing in builds from 20110923 or earlier so appears fixed by bug 687768.
  • Johnath to ping JB about Thunderbird participation in this meeting
    • Sent mail, they are going to participate, but are going to lurk for a few weeks first (hi tbirders!)
  • Johnath to ping Todd about apps participation in this meeting
    • Sent mail...

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 7)

Beta (8)

Aurora (9)

  • We got some really nice capabilities uplifted from m-c to Aurora yesterday. Here's a taste.
    • "Type Inference" giving us up to 44% performance improvements on AWFY
    • Twitter Search
    • "Two-finger swipe for Lion" for back and forward navigation on Mac 10.7 Lion.
    • "New Lion-ized theme for Lion" toolbars, icons, buttons, etc.
    • Tweaks to the Windows theme for Win7 consistency
    • You can now create bookmarks by dragging text URLs to bookmarks toolbar
    • Now you can drag a link from another app and just drop it on Firefox and it will load
    • "Always restore pinned tabs" No matter what the users settings for restoring tabs (or not) the App Tabs should always be restored.
    • "Improve responsiveness of history removals" deleting large numbers of history items from the Library view used to hang the browser forever. now it is much faster.
    • "Add support for fave icons on jump list uri entries" Windows 7 JumpLists, a pretty important windows integration feature, just got a lot better. Right click on Firefox in the taskbar and see the beautiful icon-ified jumplist popup.
    • "should be able to reset a resized textarea" Users can resize text areas in Firefox. If you resize a textarea and then double click on the resizer it will reset to the original dimensions.
    • "Sync should never complain about a network problem anymore unless you the Sync Now menu item/toolbar button is clicked." Sync is getting less noisy with its errors.
    • "Implement font-stretch property" was completed in 9. It's notable because it was filed in 1999 :-)
    • "add mouseenter and mouseleave DOM events" high-profile web devs have been begging for this for a good while.
    • "Implement CSS3 columns shorthand" CSS 3 columns are more important than ever and with IE 10 (and Windows 9) adding support for multi-column layout, we're finally getting there with colums.
    • "Implement CSS3 text-overflow: <left> <right>"
    • "API for controlling fullscreen from content" (still preffed off.)
    • "Implement temporal dimension portion of Media Fragments URI specification for video/audio" This is kind of a huge step for Open Video.

Nightly (10)

  • The last week of trunk development was pretty great. Most of this made the uplift to Aurora as well.
    • Bug 635645 - consider increasing the amount of scrolling performed by using the arrow keys -- This makes us scroll fast like all the other browsers. Easy win on perceived performance.
    • Some nice tweaks to from front-end folks
      • Bug 684450 - Remove stop/go/reload button affordance and streamline other location bar icons
      • Bug 689051 - drop the drop shadow on the back button for Windows 7
      • Bug 632365 - Delay status updates for links further
      • Bug 462117 - Add specialized video controls for small-dimension media.
      • Bug 472942 - VideoDocument should center video in tab

Firefox Mobile

The bigger issues

  • Will Java front-end be feasible? Doug T. is driving toward an initial pros/cons analysis over the next week
  • Flash support will land on nightly in the next few days, need to evaluate and set criteria for whether it would be good enough to ship (Note, this is smartphones only, because it's Gingerbread and earlier, not Honeycomb)
  • Startup shrink continues and the focus is to get us ready for toronto work week. We're capturing baseline measurements for mem usage and responsiveness so that we can track optimization wins. We are also looking at analysis of metrics across release channel builds.
  • We need to agree across groups on goals for downloads and active users for Q4 - Jay will drive this
  • IME and keyboard are being tackled by alexp, masayuki, snorp and blassey

Top three customer issues and plan to fix

  • startup/stability; 38% of 1 & 2-star ratings on Android Market are "slow/unstable"; startupshrink project is the plan to fix
  • other performance themes: page loading performance and scrolling/panning performance; getting quit in the background; memshrink project is the plan to fix
  • flash player; biggest issue on SUMO every week since launch; mobile platform group is working on a click-to-play solution

7

  • Released to Android market
  • Ad-Block plus is likely the only major add-on affected by "hidden" add-on issue, no plan (let's discuss) to revert to 6.0.
  • Reminder: Key Features in this release
    • Copy & Paste
    • Added a ‘Quit’ action to the Android menu
    • Language detection on first-run
    • Improved image rendering on Tegra-based tablets and phones (see bug 669851)
    • The WebSocket API is now available in Firefox for Android (see bug 537787)

8

9

  • Major tablet UX refresh - good feedback on input so far
  • Webapps support
  • More locale picker work
  • Camera
  • Need to make decisions on:
    • Flash on demand (front-end patch getting better)
    • UA
    • Featurettes, like the Clear Private Data changes (need to triage)

Firefox Sync

Add-on Builder

  • Q3 2011 goals are on-track for completion
  • AMO integration nearing completion
  • Builder "1.0" public launch is targeted for mid-Q1 2012

Add-on SDK

Release (1.1 -> Firefox 7)

  • 1.0 -> 1.1 repack occurred Monday, September 26
  • repack process experienced some problems; they have now been resolved
  • repack post-mortem to take place this week or next

Stabilization (1.2 -> Firefox 7, 8)

  • second test build, 1.2b2, spun yesterday, Tuesday, September 27 (announcement)
  • final release on schedule for Tuesday, October 25, two weeks before Firefox 8
  • will probably move up final release one week to Tuesday, October 18, three weeks before Firefox 8 (discussion)

Development (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

  • merge to stabilization branch on schedule for Tuesday, October 25
  • will probably move up merge and final release one week to ship three weeks before Firefox 9

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Got a little busy with 7.0.1 so here's a copy-paste of the note I sent to rrrt last night:

  • Broken extensions:
    • Yahoo Toolbar is a big one, apparently bookmarks stored there are wiped out entirely. Lots of complaints of dataloss here. (May also be bug 680802)
    • One or two people saying noscript went missing (that's bug 680802).
    • Lots of complaints about Norton toolbar -- Users have to update via Norton first before updating Firefox.
    • Kaspersky doesn't work at all.
    • Java console also making a reappearance.
    • 1Password - From kev "1Password switched to a full JS implementation a while back. Users have been reluctant (from what I understand) to upgrade because there's some functionality loss."
    • Some banking extension (maybe trusteer)
    • Roboform (also lots of complaints)
  • Spike in people saying they lost bookmarks/favorites -- may be Yahoo toolbar. I know people about two weeks ago were saying that we "forced Yahoo on them" so I'm not sure what's going on and Yahoo may have eaten the bookmarks. Or it can be the usual upgrade = profile loss.
  • Firefox not responding randomly. (May be bug 686025 but triggered by the update or some users are saying that they are updating directly from 5 because of this problem but it's back.)
  • Lost sessions (but we see this with almost every update) -- may be worse this time but hard to say.
  • A few complaints about the missing http (not a lot... but some comments that it broke intranet pages and general whining)
  • Maybe something about Yahoo mail layouts being screwed up (can't reproduce here.)

Mobile

See mobile section for customer issues above.

UX & User Research

Tablet UI exploration (aka usability testing) to take place in Toronto during mobile work week (most likely Oct 18-19th). User research (aka Mary T) is looking for a developer or two to sit in on these sessions.

Market Insights

A fix landed in Chromium to synchronise extension settings.

Amazon announced the Silk Browser for the new Kindle Fire tablet.

Rockmelt announced that they will support Facebook OpenGraph in the Beta product in a few weeks.

Tizen, an open source, Linux-based mobile platform, was launched by the Linux Foundation. It is positioned as a standards-based OS to support web apps on mobile devices.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction




Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

  • Kev to come back with a summary of the current state of the ESR discussions
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