Firefox/Planning/2012-01-25

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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

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 9)

  • 3.6.26 to be released to the beta population tomorrow, subsequently released next Tuesday

Beta (10)

  • Pushing our final beta out tomorrow, and plan to release on Tuesday
  • Add-ons default to compatible is in Firefox 10. Add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4+ will be compatible in Firefox 10.
  • Add-on hotfix testing is in Firefox 10 and testing is going well with our beta audience - once the metrics team helps verify our understanding of the data we've gotten back, we can greenlight the use of a hotfix in the place of some chemspills

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

  • bug 566489: inline autocomplete has landed thanks to efforts from David Dahl and Marco Bonardo. Marco has been fixing followups in an attempt to polish the feature for release, but we may end up disabling it on Aurora to get some extra bake time.
  • Snappy (last week's summary)

Firefox Mobile

  • Working toward Beta
  • Current status blog post
  • Nightly
  • Aurora
    • not to steal sync's thunder, but we expect sync to be uplifted by the end of the week
    • several non-sync patches are dependent on sync landing, so will get unblocked by that
  • Beta
    • when 11 goes to beta, we'll be doing a split release
      • incompatibility needs to be built into the manifests
      • manifests patches are based on branding, should land soon
      • RelEng and QA are conducting testing with a dummy market product to validate all these moving pieces
  • Release

Firefox Sync

  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles
    • Migration from XUL to Native will likely cause your sync account to disappear
      • mobile is investigating a fix
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
  • The sync team is planning to migrate our code base to MPL v2.0
    • Please holler if there is any reason we should not.
  • old news that bears repeating

Add-on Builder

  • Release today
  • Next week we begin intensive QA rounds in preparation for release
  • Marketing/PR is assigning someone to handle our 1.0 launch
  • 1st Web Builder code check-in happened this week, hoping to have a working prototype in ~5 weeks

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

  • 1.4 Released two weeks ago - no issues

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

  • 1.5b2 Released yesterday
  • On track to release on Feb. 21st, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

  • Have made good progress on Talos testing - jhammel blogged about it
  • Still having discussion of localizing html elements in SDK-based addons - please join in
  • On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21st, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

  • Follow up from last week:
    • [1] Slowness in 10 peaked (although not much of one) around the 8th and has been falling (a little) since.

Firefox 9.0.1

  • Nothing major new.
  • Some complaints around 3.6 > 9 major update (where is reload button, confusion around session restore, extensions)

Mobile

UX & User Research

Research: The Mobile Diary Project is progressing nicely. We are in the process of recruiting participants to tell us how they use apps and how they use the browser. There will be opportunities for you to meet with these mobile users coming up in mid-February. Email Mary Trombley if you have questions.

Design

  • New ux-review@mozilla.com UI review queue is being beat into submission on a daily basis
    • We reduced the number of uiwanted's from 420 to 316 (104 bugs processed) last week, racing towards zero!
  • Metro UI design work is starting, and we know what we can (and can't) do wrt. WinRT and Win32 APIs
  • Trond & Josh hard at work for Gaia (B2G) UI for Mobile World Congress
  • Sync “papercut” fixes are in progress (Yuan and Jinghua)
  • Designs on BrowserID, log in to the browser + next-generation sync approach is starting this week (Zhenshuo)
  • zpao landed Lion fullscreen mode on the UX branch, is epic
  • New tab page has visual improvements (Boriss & ttaubert)
  • Design work on translation of content in-browser is starting this week too (Yuan)

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Microsoft

  • There continue to be persistent rumours that Microsoft is planning to have a unified platform from the OS kernel up for Windows 8, "not just in terms of a common design language and interface (Metro), the same HTML5 Internet Explorer browser and integration with Windows Live and Azure — but also in terms of a common core."
  • Other rumours indicate that the next release of Windows 8 will be called a consumer preview, not "beta". Interviews with developers who have recently built apps on the current Developer Preview said, overall, that it is still rough, with plenty of missing functionality, but that they found it possible to build the apps they wanted.
  • Microsoft also released an updated version of Compat Inspector that works with the IE10 Preview. This tool allows webmasters to identify changes that are required to better serve IE9 and IE10.

Google

  • An interesting blog post details a claim that the primary reason Google decided to create the Chrome browser was to perfect technologies required to better crawl the web, all in an effort to improve search rankings. By citing patent applications, the author makes the claim that "GoogleBot is a browser".
  • Google released some advertising videos promoting the automatic translation capabilities of Chrome.
  • Recent WebKit / Chrome developments include a screen-size emulation back-end in the Web Inspector tool, which will soon allow for easy emulation of mobile device screens, and the first commits to support the Shadow DOM in Javascript.
  • Google also awarded $6133.70 in rewards to teams reporting four security bugs in Chrome; all four are fixed in the latest stable version of the browser.

Opera

Other

  • At an upcoming security conference in Vancouver, separate teams of hackers will be competing to win $60,000 to take advantage of recently-patched vulnerabilities in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.
  • An interesting interview on the W3C blog with the head of the Financial Times' web team on why they decided to abandon their iOS native client application and develop an HTML5 version instead. They describe some of the functionality they miss (notifications) and the workarounds they had to develop to handle additional caching and swiping functionality.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

  • Dolphin HD will come preloaded with add-ons, reveals new beta release
  • Sony Ericsson joins HTC and Motorola with low Q4 2011 results, but will revamp strategy as it becomes Sony
  • HTC to integrate IBM business solutions on devices in effort to consolidate on the enterprise market
  • Apple on path to 20% smartphone sales marketshare for 2011 after record Q4 2011 results
  • Quad-core 1.5 GHz devices on their way, by Samsung
  • Mobile payments rushing towards mainstream availability in the US and Europe
  • RIM has a new CEO, no strategic changes are planned

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction


Desktop

  • 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads in progress, working on updating copy on Major Update billboard to improve CTRs.
  • Readying materials for the releases next week (Aurora, Beta, GA).
  • Working on a devices landing page experiment for Mozilla.org/Firefox
  • Marketing plan for next release.

Mobile

  • Tablet media buy campaign ends this week (SEM efforts still live)
  • Facebook ads for tablets ended yesterday
  • MWC content and messaging
  • Marketing plan for FF11
  • Blog post for FF11 Beta
  • Optimizing acquisition funnel for Aurora and Beta

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week