Firefox/Planning/2012-04-04
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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.
Contents
Actions from Last Week
Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases
Firefox Desktop
Release (3.6.28, 11.0, 10.0.3esr)
- Our plans for migrating 3.6 users off of that unsupported Firefox version was communicated on dev.planning
Beta (12)
- We are here in the schedule
- Please take a look at the bugs tracked for Firefox 12 (released 4/24), and waiting to land on the ESR10 branch before the week of 4/16
- Currently investigating bug 742095 – Bookmarks toolbar not showing bookmarks (empty) on start
- If you know of any changes that could have triggered this in our testing population, please comment in the bug
Aurora (13)
- Please take a look at the bugs tracked for Firefox 13
- We'll be addressing the support changes in FF13 during the FF12 cycle with bug 741004 – Create a hotfix add-on to communicate the FF13 de-support
Nightly (14)
- Do you use or want to use data collected by Telemetry? We're starting to work on the Telemetry dashboard UX. Please provide your thoughts on the Telemetry dashboard, what works, what doesn't, what you've find useful in bug 736484 or contact Lawrence Mandel.
Firefox Mobile
- Slight change of plan. Fx14 will be our ship vehicle.
- We will no longer be uplifting aggressively to aurora for Fx13
Aurora (13)
- Uplifted a bunch of UI and Sync patches
Nightly (14)
- Stability improves
- Work on blockers continues
- Video-based Performance Testing: William Lachance has been working on the EideTicker Dashboard and has checkerboarding tests for scrolling and zooming.
Firefox Sync
- Native Sync (nightly)
- Push Tab to Device has landed (requires a desktop addon)
- Forms sync (preffed off) has landed
- Sync for Boot 2 Gecko/Sign into Browser
- In progress
- Sync 2.0/persona/BrowserId Flag day is now tied to this & B2G's deadlines
- Old Clients will not work after Flag Day
Add-on SDK
Release (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)
- Released 1.6 yesterday!
- lots of bugfixes
- biggest addition is the brand new documentation
Stabilization (1.7 -> Firefox 12, 13)
- Merged dev to stabilization yesterday
- On track to release 15 May 2012
Development (1.8 -> Firefox 13, 14)
- On track to merge to Stabilization 15 May 2012
- More interesting things to look out for in the future
- landing the loader in Firefox
- capacity to more easily share modules
- porting portions of tools from python to js
Identity
Apps
- B2G can now install Apps. Cool.
- Firefox Desktop 14 (Nightly) - being reviewed
- Native Install
- Chromeless launch of apps
- Firefox Mobile 14 (Nightly) - in progress
- Native install
- Chromefull launch of Marketplace and apps
- Proposed Android solution is to bundle the marketplace with Firefox. More coming on this.
- Apps in the Cloud
- Apps in the Cloud server available for developers
- Apps in the Cloud client demo due Friday
Feedback Summary
Desktop
- We blocklisted Java. People really want it to re-enable it (and there seems to be problems if you have multiple old java versions where installing an update doesn't work)
- The flash update caused "your browser is blocking flash" errors on Yahoo/AT&T mail. This has since been resolved (thanks kev!)
Mobile
UX & User Research
User Research The UR team will be conducting a longitudinal study to understand how people use our new Search Tabs feature. Search tabs allows you to search for something, and see results from various sources. For example, if you search for "harry potter," you will see the Google results for "harry potter" with icons down the left hand side of your page. Currently, the icons are for Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Ebay, Twitter, and Wikipedia. If you click on the Yahoo icon, the main screen will change from Google to Yahoo, and you can see the results there. The idea is that the search tabs provide more data to the user, and users will see that some searches are better on some search engines than on others. It's a way to help open the web back up during the search process.
Overall Study Objectives
- Understand the situations when people use tabbed search, their reactions to using tabbed search, and what they do with the information after searching
- Answer the question, "Do users find tabbed search valuable to their search activities?"
- Determine other sites people would like to see as part of the tabbed search including sites they would add on their own using the plus button
- Provide design recommendations based on user feedback and usage
- Make a final recommendation on whether or not to deploy this feature.
Research Overview
- Participants will complete a one-week logging activity kicked off by a one hour, in-person interview
- The logging activity includes using the new search feature three times per day, and then answering a set of questions about their experiences using the feature.
Dates
- The study begins April 18, and we expect to have results by the end of May/beginning of June.
Questions/Comments:
- Contact Cori Schauer, cschauer@mozilla.com or IRC: cschauer
UX design
- Android
- spec for native tablet UI nearly done, bugs opening; next version of phone UI explorations done, specs to come
- short list of final UX nice-to-haves for v1 in preparation: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/ZWwMvwVlGZ
- B2G - detailed wireframing work on Firefox/browser for B2G ongoing
- Metro - design sketching / early wireframing for touch-oriented Metro UI https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_Metro_UI
- Desktop
- further refinement of sign-into-browser
- iterating through interaction design for (Australis) browser customization
- design explorations for social api UI
Market Insights
Desktop / Platform
Amazon
- Amazon released an update for the Silk Browser included with the Kindle Fire. It includes a "Reading View" feature: "When invoked by the customer, Silk will load the body of the page in a reading-optimized, single screen view (even for multi-page articles). The full page is still available in the background, allowing the reader to easily toggle back to a traditional view to see other interesting features on the page." Some early reviews have been mixed, noting that it sometimes renders multi-page articles in the wrong order.
- Google released version 1 of the Go programming language
- The Chrome Web Store has some improved app and extension discovery features: a trending lens, app subcategories, search box autocomplete, and app badges.
- The Chromium and Beta Channels were updated, including 9 security fixes, including one with SPDY proxy certificate checking
- A UI developer took screenshots of the Google homepage using 14 different Android browsers
Webkit
- A Samsung developer landed support for the Network Information API, albeit only for the EFL port.
- Facebook open-sourced Ringmark, a browser test suite for building apps on the mobile web.
Microsoft
- Microsoft summarized how different display types and sizes will be handled in Windows 8.
- Another post describes how pinned sites will work with the Windows 8 start screen
Adobe
- Adobe released an updated version of Flash, the last standalone version for the Linux platform, that requires that developers pay a 9% royalty on revenues over $50,000 for applications that make use of two new performance APIs. Gamasutra published a good summary of how Flash developers feel about it.
- Adobe's latest Flash update introduces an auto-updater on Windows.
Apple
- Sencha posted a detailed overview of HTML5 support in the updated iOS 5 platform.
Opera
- The latest Opera 12 snapshot includes a "opera:cpu" page, which shows the CPU use of every open tab.
WebM
- The WebM project announced that more chip vendors have introduced hardware support for the video protocol, including Rockchip and ST-Ericsson. Smart TVs with full HD WebM support are coming to the market from LG Electronics this spring, with other OEMs following soon after.
Mobile
Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.
- 64% of Androids run on Gingerbread, 23% on Froyo and 3% on Ice Cream Sandwich
- Minor update to Ice Cream Sandwich has been pushed to the Android Open Source repository
- Android has captured 50% of all smartphones in the US
- Searches from smartphones and tablets combined will generate 25% of Google's paid search clicks in the US by the end of 2012
- The European Commission began an antitrust investigation of Motorola Mobility with regards to mobile patents
- The European Commission extended a cap on roaming fees for voice and SMS enacted price limits on roaming data fees
- The Nokia Lumia 900, the flagship device for Windows Phone 7 for the US market, has had its first reviews
- Nokia is rumoured to be planning to launch 2 new Linux-based low-end devices for the emerging markets
- Opera released a privacy-conscious mobile campaign tracker solution
Marketing, Press & Public Reaction
Desktop
- Working on billboards for 3.6 EOL release. L10n is the blocker.
- Preparing comms and collaterral for next release.
Mobile
- Finalizing Beta promotions and communications
- Launch efforts and campaigns on track for GA release
Other
Press
- Firefox Makes Progress on Metro Version
- Mozilla shows off a Metro style Firefox prototype for Windows 8
- Firefox for Windows 8 Beginning to Take Shape
- Mozilla Teases Windows 8 Metro Firefox with Screenshots
Questions, Comments, FYI
- Sync & AITC (apps in the cloud)
- tl;dr separate hardware, separate behaviors, same engineering team
- the services team is supporting the backend of aitc, but not the front end
- different hardware
- different ToS (see below for why)
- AITC has durable cleartext data, mozilla can see your data
- sync has encrypted, nondurable data sync is not a backup! and mozilla cant see your data
