Firefox/Planning/2011-11-09

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

• Blizzard/Juan to come back on compat issues in Firefox 10 from UA version scraping

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 8)

• Firefox 3.6.24 → 8.0 advertised update is scheduled for 2011-11-17

Beta (9)

• Going to build for Firefox 9 beta 1 today
  • We normally build on Tuesday, it was delayed due to some migration issues
  • Hopefully pushing to the beta audience on late Thursday or early Friday
    • Depends on QA signoff
• Big change in Fx9 is Type Inference

Aurora (10)

• Daily updates are turned off while we qualify the builds / do backouts (as we always do)
• We must fix bug 700988 before turning on daily updates

Nightly (11)

Firefox Mobile

8

9

• Need to remove the "Install Aurora" promo (waiting to land)

10

• Disabling Flash by default

Native UI

• Testday on Friday
• Install it: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-birch-android/
• Try it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI/NightlyFeatures

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10:
  • Improving Sync Set Up - Went into Aurora. Working with Support to make sure we update docs appropriately
• Firefox 11+:
  • Push to Device - In development. You can play with an add-on here. Signing off on UX
  • Addon Sync - In development, signing off on UX.
  • Java Porting for Sync - is in progress

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Release (1.2 -> Firefox 7, 8)

• AMO-hosted addons based on SDK 1.1 were repacked to 1.2 last week for Firefox 8 release
• this repack included locally-developed addons, but future repacks will include only Builder-developed ones, per plans previously announced
• repack successful for most such addons (several hundred); authors of six with issues were notified

Stabilization (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• 1.3b3 test build released yesterday, Tuesday, November 8 with a number of bug fixes
• 1.3rc1 test build on track for next Tuesday, November 15
• 1.3 final release on track for Tuesday, November 29
• 1.2 tests as compatible with Firefox 9 test builds; thus it does not look like we'll need to do a 1.2 -> 1.3 repack

Development (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• continues apace, on track to merge to stabilization branch on Tuesday, November 29 and ship on Tuesday, January 10

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 8

• Favicons are lost on bookmark bar/many sites. [1]
• Extensions (especially especially Java Console) but also Roboform, Trusteer, Norton, AVG
• Some people are reporting that accessing pages from the address bar doesn't work, have to search/use bookmarks.
• Very weird: Add-ons manager is completely blank (although extensions are there) and the add-on selection screen didn't show. [2]
• Possibly crashier

General

• We pushed a snippet (again) that broke Restore previous session from about:home. bug 682944

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Competitors

• Javascript
  • Intel released a beta Firefox extension for their River Trail project, which allows browser Javascript engines to access the vector processing extensions present on most/all multicore CPUs.

• Adobe Flash
  • Adobe announced they will not continue to develop the mobile Flash browser plug-in, but will rather focus efforts on their AIR platform for mobile.

• Windows XP / Windows 7
  • Windows XP's market share is starting to decrease more rapidly as enterprises move to (finally) adopt Windows 7. Net Applications said that Windows' market share dropped 2.5% in October alone, and is now at 48%.

• Windows 8
  • All tile updates/notifications in the Metro interface will be "data-driven", in that they will be pushed from application backends to Microsoft's "Windows Push Notification Service", analogous to Apple's APNS and Google's Cloud to Device Messaging service.

• IE10
  • The IE10 team provided more detail regarding their implementation of spell-checking in IE10, which will, for commonly-misspelled words, also offer auto-correction. It will also offer full support for the HTML5 spellcheck attribute for content input elements.

• IE9
  • Microsoft also unveiled a promotion, apparently aimed at Firefox and Chrome users on Vista and Windows 7, where users who upgrade to IE9 can obtain free movie tickets or Hulu streaming, despite the fact that Windows XP users are not permitted to upgrade to IE9.

• Webkit
  • Recent changes have given Apple's JavaScriptCore another 3.8% speed improvement on Kraken and 3.5% on v8, with parallel tracing added to garbage collection, reducing pauses by 50% in regular usage.
    • Microsoft indicated that one of their upcoming products will require the addition of an allow-popups directive to the iframe sandbox, so the Webkit team added it this week.
    • A compile-time flag has been added for CSS Shaders, indicating that work there will be commencing soon.

• Google Chrome
  • Google, in their beta channel, released the "sign in to Chrome" feature, allowing, as with Firefox Sync, for profiles to be synchronized across devices and for more than one user to share the same device without commingling bookmarks and other settings.

• Apple Safari
  • Sencha proclaims that Safari on the iPhone 4s and iOS 5 as providing the best mobile HTML5 developer platform, citing its speedy canvas, WebGL, device compass, web workers, and XHR level 2 support.

• Bonus: Javascript growth on top websites
  • There's been a 35% growth in average amount of Javascript included on the Top 12,000 websites globally in the last 12 months, as reported by httparchive.org: http://bit.ly/vjTsv2

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Samsung became the biggest smartphone vendor in Q3, followed by Apple, Nokia, HTC and RIM

• 44% of all Android devices run on v2.3, with 41% on v2.2 and 11% on v 2.1, but Android fragmentation is a costly business

• The next version of Google TV will run on Android

• Adobe will stop working on Flash for mobile

• Opera announced 131 million users for Opera Mini and released platform stats

• Sony now fully owns SonyEricsson, and new rumours of WebOS acquisition surface

• Quad-core Tegra 3 phones are on their way

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Christian announced a script to scrape input and generate CSVs last week. There was a bug in it for certain types of queries
  • Cheng was right! We generally have more negative feedback than positive in input
    • There is surely selection bias in there so the more interesting information is trends and comparing various Firefox versions
  • If you are using the script, make sure you have the latest, which is confirmed fixed
• I think I remember hearing that Fx 9 might be the last XUL version of Firefox mobile. Is that still the plan? Will Firefox 10 be the native UI version of mobile that's on nightlies now?
• Myk: I started the Jetpack Features working group to investigate the feasibility of shipping core Firefox features as default addons built with the Add-on SDK.
• If you're going to a MozCamp, make sure to point people excited about NativeUI to the new Mobile Test Drivers Program (http://www.mozilla.org/mobile/testdrivers).

Actions this week

• Johnathan to talk to engagement about bug 682944, and our process for snippet QA