Firefox/Planning/2012-03-07

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Finch 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

• Asa to follow up with Comms on announcing end of win2K support. For consumers, it's time to upgrade your OS or move to Opera. For managed deployments, the ESR supports win2K for another 10 months or so.
  • Erica leading this. Will probably be combined with some other announcements.
• Kev to follow up with McAfee on error from Desktop Feedback
  • Per the SiteAdvisor product team, this was an error that occurred with users of 3.4, and updating to the latest version corrected it. The SiteAdvisor team responded in the SUMO question, and pushed an update to correct it without user intervention last week.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10, 10esr)

• Latest 10.0.3esr nightlies communicated to enterprise list on Monday (3/5)
• Beta of 3.6.28 going out today (3/7)

Beta (11)

• Firefox 11 sign-offs today (3/7) in Warp Core at 1PM PT
• Firefox 11 beta 6 expected to go out today (3/7)
• Final go-to-build for FF11 will be Friday (3/9)

• As a reminder, these are the products that we plan to ship
  • Firefox 11
  • XUL Fennec 10 off of ESR branch
  • Firefox 3.6.28
  • Firefox 10.0.3esr

Aurora (12)

• Silent Update: Removal of OS security dialog for Windows - remaining security work landed.

Firefox Sync

• App Sync for App store
  • for Marketplace
  • durable storage for app receipts
  • sync is not building the client portion, but the server
• In Progress:
  • Android Sync
    • Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
  • Sync 2.0 protocol/Persona(BrowserID) auth integration
    • will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
    • representing significant changes on front & back ends
      • current 2.0 draft spec: https://github.com/mozilla-services/docs/blob/master/source/storage/apis-2.0.rst
    • if you know someone maintaining a sync client outside of Firefox Desktop & Android Sync, tell them to talk to me asap.
      • 2.0 will break their expected behavior

Add-on Builder

• Push today
• Working on a third-party library contest with the Add-ons team

Add-on SDK

Release (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• No issues to report

Stabilization (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Spinning up 1.6b1 today
• On track to release on 3 April, 2012

Development (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on 3 April, 2012
• We have places to track landing the loader & APIs in Fx

SDK-based Add-on of the week? Collusion!

Identity

The feature page for Sign Into The Browser has mock-ups!

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Top issues (1): Complaints about Ant Video Downloader not working ("it got automatically uninstalled"). They have a beta version that works great. [1]
• Still seeing the following issues: Babylon toolbar, searchqu, other search "features", Foxtab.
• Noscript + Facebook + App Tabs = slow page loading [2]
• Localized builds updating to en-US is bug 727508, Secunia Personal security Inspector (PSI)

Firefox 11:

• Huge (20%) spike in positive feedback (probably because we pushed out localized "give us feedback" snippets. Jump was mostly in pt-BR (wow!) and de locales.

UX & User Research

Welcome to Cori Schauer, our new senior user researcher. She will be working on Firefox and related issues.

The Mozilla Mobile Study was completed this week. We learned a lot about participants' use of browsers and apps. We're planning on presenting to various constituencies over the next few weeks, including mobile engineering and QA. Ping Mary to get invited.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• A new Suggested pages feature landed in the Canary builds of Chrome. It's not clear, but it appears that this feature will adaptively suggest web pages that the user should visit based on their browsing behavior.
• A ChromeOS Developer shared some screenshots of the upcoming "Desktop" mode for the operating system, complete with wallpapers, folders and window panels.
• Google announced that Android apps could now pass 50MB in size. Individual APKs still have this limit, but can have up to two additional "expansion files" of up to 2GB in size.
• Extensions for Google Chrome are now required to support the browser's Content-Security-Policy. External research from UC Berkeley indicates that these three steps would prevent 96% of core extension vulnerabilities. Extensions will no longer be able to :

1. use inline scripts ("<script> ... </script>") and will have to load scripts from within their package
2. use eval()
3. plugins will only be able to loaded from within their package or from a whitelist of (Google-trusted) HTTPS hosts

• The BlitzTech Gaming engine and the Havok Physics Engine announced support for the NativeClient platform.
• At the same time, apps in the Chrome Web Store now have access to an improved In-App Payments solution
• Google announced that the US State Department had adopted Chrome as its default browser. Within two weeks 60% of the organization's 58,000 desktops had been switched to the browser.
• Chrome's Canary builds now support scoped stylesheets.
• The latest Chrome stable release includes 20 security fixes for which Google awarded $47,500 in bonuses to security researchers.
• Bonus: Google's MWC 2012 wrapup video

Microsoft

• An MSIE developer posted a long list of the minor changes in MSIE10 that were released in the Consumer Preview. Among many other changes, Ctrl-U now opens the View Source window, as with many other browsers.
• The IE team released a TV commercial that celebrates the beauty of the web as experienced with MSIE.
• As part of the Consumer Preview release, the IE team developed new HTML5 test cases for the IE Testing Center. There's now 7,548 of them there, with detailed summaries of how MSIE9, MSIE10, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome fare against them. They also released a short video demonstrating some of the new hardware accelerated CSS features, comparing them directly with Chrome.

Opera

• For those of you going to SXSW Interactive, check out Opera's list of talks there.

Adobe

• Adobe released a security update for Flash. The update addresses two critical issues that were identified by Google security researchers.

Apple

• The US Patent Office granted Apple a patent with 76 claims involving tablet and smartphone user interfaces. One industry commentator described them as a "megaton bomb" for Apple. Another patent was awarded for an "iWallet" system for Apple.
• Spaceport.io released a benchmark study that measured how many sprites could be handled at 30fps. Apparently Mobile Safari on iOS could handle three times the number of sprites that the Android browser could. For the results of running this benchmark on a Windows 7 machine running Firefox 10 and Chrome 18, see here.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Press

• Mozilla Firefox launches Collusion, new add-on that enables users to see who is tracking them
  
• Mozilla's Big Plans for Tracking Who Tracks You Online
  
• Firefox Plug-in Reveals The Small Army Stalking You On The Web
  

Questions, Comments, FYI

• How/where can I contact the Adblock Plus? does he exist on teh IRCs? (ally)
• Apps is making changes to Firefox desktop and mobile and integrates (or will soon) with both. I propose that we add Apps to the upcoming releases. Does this seem beneficial to this group? (lmandel)

Actions this week

• Jorge to follow-up with Ant Downloader devs/plan of action (from desktop Feedback) and ensure beta and follow-on releases address identified issue(s)