Firefox/Planning/2011-10-19

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

Actions from Last Week

• Jen to come back with postmortem summary for sync issues in FF7

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 7)

Beta (8)

• Discussions are ongoing about removing tab re-ordering and tab to window experience.
• Discussions are ongoing about removing support for two-finger horizontal swipe on Lion.
• Discussions are ongoing about the efficacy of our "opt out of third party plug-ins" feature.

Aurora (9)

Nightly (10)

• Silent Update progress
  • Ehasan has posted a plan for background updates https://wiki.mozilla.org/Background_Updates
  • bbondy is making great progress on the service to rout around UAC and Admin password requirements.
• Add-ons compatible by default is being tracked in this dependency tree https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692664

Firefox Mobile

Customer pain points and plans to fix

Feedback has returned to post-release levels, but ratios remain constant for top 3 customer dissatisfiers this week:

• Support for Flash: 10% of Android Market v7 reviews request Flash; 138 votes on SUMO ask how to get flash player working; 11% of Input issues for v7 and 20% of Input issues for v8 are related to Flash. Click-to-play solution is in-progress to fix.
• Performance: 10% of Android Market v7 reviews say Firefox Mobile is slow (start-up speed is most frequent negative comment). Native UI work is in-progress to fix.
• Stability: 9% of Android Market v7 reviews are complaints about crashing/freezing/hangs. Native UI work is in-progress to fix.

Customer compliments on Beta features

• Master password
• Send performance data
• Permissions removal

7

8

9

Firefox Sync

Sync issues - The 503 storm of 2011

• Fuel for the fire:
  • Instant Sync:
    • Created unexpected 30-50% spike in traffic
  • Broken Server-Sent backoff
  • Poor server capacity/health for existing users

• Firefighting:
  • Infrastructure changes
    • DB updates
    • Load balancer updates
    • Webserver tuning

• • Migration
    • Added capacity
    • Pruned stale data
    • Migrate users from overloaded servers

• Fireproofing:
  • Better modeling for current and expected traffic on Sync features
  • Ops review and sign off on feature pages
  • Required system-review for all client behavior changes
  • Require reliability metrics and dashboard of these on all channels
  • Instill a review of changes and metrics 1 week before merging on all channels
  • Fix backoff code in Fx8
  • Re-triage of maintenance bugs for any lurking issues
  • Blog posts coming from both Ops and Engineering

• Firefox 10+:
  • Improving Sync Set Up - In development. Getting close.
  • Push to Device - In development. You can play with an add-on here.
  • Addon Sync - In development.
  • Scoping work for Fennec Java porting for Sync

Add-on Builder

• Push today @ 2pm
• All Q4 goals on-track - Q4 Goals
• 1.0 launch on-track for early/mid Q1 2012

Add-on SDK

Release (1.2 -> Firefox 7, 8)

• We released 1.2 yesterday afternoon!
• Release notes here
• Will be running repacker again and will move to the new repack policy of builder-only repacks for the 1.3 release if needed.
• bug 695436 describes the change we landed yesterday, necessitating a last-minute respin, to make sure the SDK 1.2 release remains compatible with whatever changes to third-party addon installation land late in the Firefox 8 beta cycle.

Stabilization (1.3 -> Firefox 7, 8)

• Merged development branch into stabilization branch yesterday
• 1.3 on-track to release Nov. 29th

Development (1.4 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• Development Branch now open for features landing in 1.4
• Merge to Stabilization due upon 1.3 release

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 7.0.1

• "Exc in ev handl: Error: Bad NPObject" error. Currently known causes: McAfee & VNC
• Binding close buttons to close browser rather than close tab bug 685225
• Hangs!

Firefox 8.0

• A few site-specific things (Google Finance?, baidu?, k12.com)
• Complaints from dragging tabs to bookmarks toolbar/can't drag at all.
• Still seeing hangs and freezing (but bug 691509 isn't out yet)

Mobile

See mobile section above.

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Desktop

Coming back, most likely next week

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

This week is mostly about Android 4.0. There is also news on Opera's new approach for Android, a report on the Internet's contribution to GDP, which reaches up to 6% in mature markets like Sweden, Apple missing analysts' forecasts but coming back in Q4 and a case study on an NFC security implementation.

Android 4.0:

The browser does not have Chrome branding, but keeps the old one; its improvements include:

• better tab viewing,
• live previews of websites in the thumbnail open tabs list,
• incognito mode,
• web pages load the mobile sites as default; users can request the desktop version;
• Save for Offline features in HTML format
• bookmarks sync with Chrome on the desktop

Android 4.0 user-facing improvements:

• works on phones and tablets
• cleaner design, less boxes and squares
• text input more responsive, spell-checker
• improvements to speech-to-text
• the People app integrates contacts on the phone with Google+, Twitter
• gmail improved
• apps can be grouped in folders
• camera improvements; quicker to take pictures
• new face-recognition phone unlocking mechanism
• 3 hard-coded buttons: Back, Home and Recent apps
• measure and control data usage feature; ability to set a warning for data limit on mobile networks
• Android Beam: transmit information between 2 devices by "bumping" them via NFC; 3rd-party APIs available

Android 4.0 developer-facing improvements:

• Unified UI toolkit for phones and tablets
• New social and calendar APIs, Android Beam for NFC-based instant sharing, Wi-Fi Direct support, Bluetooth Health Device Profile support.
• Improved notifications, lockscreen with camera and music controls, and improved app management in the launcher.
• New graphics, camera, and media capabilities: Image and video effects, precise camera metering and face detection, new media codecs and containers.
• Interface and input: Hardware-accelerated 2D drawing, new grid-based layout, improved soft keyboard, spell-checker API, stylus input support, and better mouse support.
• Improved accessibility: New accessibility APIs and text-to-speech APIs for writing new engines.
• Enhancements for enterprise: Keychain and VPN APIs for managing credentials and connections, a new administrator policy for disabling the camera.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Firefox 8 Beta: Visual Tour

• Firefox for Android Looks Promising
• Mozilla Eyeing Native UI for Firefox on Android
• New Firefox interface to speed up Firefox on Android
• Mozilla preps native UI for future versions of Firefox on Android

Questions, Comments, FYI

• hg issues slowing or blocking development past few days as well as 8.0b4. We think we're over the hump - see bug 693202 for more info.
• (kev) updated ESR proposal - now GLUTEN FREE!!! with FEEDBACK!!! - will be posted on Friday. planning on a one-week last-call for final feedback, and some discussion is needed on mechanics as they can affect deliverables

Actions this week