Firefox/Planning/2013-11-06

Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PT, 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# 99696 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 99696 (US)
• Vidyo Room: ProductCoordination
• Vidyo Guest URL

Actions from Last Week

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop & Platform

Current Releases

• 25 is unthrottled fully now

Beta (133)

• FF26.0b2 released yesterday, going to build on beta 3 tomorrow
• will be evaluating CTP by default in the next week or two

Aurora (54)

Nightly (134)

Firefox Metro

READ ONLY

• Team concluding Iteration #18 on Friday November 8.
• 17 out of 30 Aurora 28 blocking bugs resolved this iteration representing 53 points.
• Profile Sharing Feature - 18 out of 47 points completed - 29 remain for Iterations #19 and #20: View Bugs.
  • Uplift of Profile Sharing to Aurora 28 cannot be determined at this time. First round of QA will begin at the conclusion of Iteration #18.
• To date, 19 bugs in the Backlog are blocking uplift to Aurora 28: View Bugs.
• To date, 14 bugs remaining in Iteration #18 are blocking uplift to Aurora 28: View Bugs.

31 Total; 0 Open (0%); 13 Resolved (41.94%); 18 Verified (58.06%);

Firefox Mobile

Current Releases

Beta (133)

Fx26 (Ships 12/10)

• Beta 2 has the fix for the kitkat krasher bug 934514
• [ON TRACK] AMO discoverability
• [ON TRACK] Addition of search engines - Yahoo and Bing for en-US, FR and es-ES
• [AT RISK] Addition of search engines - Yahoo and Bing for en-GB and de (just en-GB is at risk)
• [ON TRACK] About:home redesign <= top issue is getting good traction, bug 933323
• [ON TRACK] search provider management in settings menu
• [ON TRACK] Add-ons can add content to the "promotional banner" tile
• [ON TRACK] WebRTC platform support, continued

Aurora (54)

• [ON TRACK] Overhaul of the favicon system bug 914296
• [ON TRACK] Marketplace discoverability - simple UI polish
• [ON TRACK] WebRTC platform support, continued
• [ON TRACK] Remove overscroll and show highlight instead bug 705246 and bug 791475
• [ON TRACK] Developer improvements: IDE support bug 924961
• [ON TRACK] Added locale: South African English (za-EN)
• [ON TRACK] Added locale: Thai (th)
• [ON TRACK] Added locale: Lithuanian (lt)
• [ON TRACK] Added locale: Slovenian (sl)

Nightly (134)

• [ON TRACK] bug 768667 - Use the action bar for text selection on ICS+
• [ON TRACK] bug 852608 - Add support for OpenSearch. Firefox Mobile ignores <link rel="search">
• [PROPOSED] Dynamic snippets add-on
• [PROPOSED] Added locale: Greek (el)
• [PROPOSED] Added locale: Punjabi (pa-IN)
• [PROPOSED] Developer improvements: Geckoview support for 2.3 -> 4.3 <== nightly only
• [PROPOSED] New Sync (PiCL MVP)

Developer Tools

• Outbound:
  • Re-introducing the devtools: scratchpad and style editor
    • Quote from HN: "Hey Firefox dev tools team: nice work. Keep it up! :)" Link
  • Aurora Hacks Post
    • Hacker News
• Development:
  • faster pretty-printing has landed and we're arranging uplifts.
  • many many leak fixes!
  • working on fixes for Brazil Device debugging, intermittent Jetpack failures
  • Add-on SDK 1.15 Beta 1 this week.

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Lots of Feedback around Shaw Network issues in Canada, Bug 935394, not our problem but a significant issues in the last 24 hours.

Mobile

No updates, Firefox 25 is well received.

UX & User Research

No updates this week.

Market Insights from the Market Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

• Study: Vision Mobile's report on "How HTML Can Compete with Native" evaluates gaps between W3C recommendations and implementation in browsers. [1]

• Study: Pew's Internet & American Life Project examines how Americans use the internet and how their activities affect their lives. [2] It breaks down reasons for non-usage into Relevance, Usability, Price and Lack of access.

Tencent

• China's Tencent with over 1B users is about to overtake Facebook. [3]. Tencent's mobile messaging app WeChat has over 200m users, up three times from 2012 year-ending levels of around 85m. Tencent is also preparing $200m to place on a bid for US-based SnapChat. [4]

Microsoft

• Microsoft is offering 11 goodies to developers who can demonstrate how they got 11% better page load performance in their organization’s home web page with Internet Explorer 11. [5]

Apple

• Apple's new OS X Mavericks is focused on helping OS X users be more efficiently. Positives include multi-monitor support and iCloud Keychain for security, and negatives include broken email capabilities. [6] However, it is free for all Mac users, reflecting commoditized state of operating systems besides Apple's upcoming strategies with hardware differentiation. [7]

Google

• Google's maps is evaluating integrating data about emotions, for example, places you've rated or people you hang out with, into an interactive visual presentation reflecting our real life connections and peek into the future and possibly travel there. [8]

Amazon

• Amazon is trying to get independent book stores to sell Kindles. [9] Retailers will have the option of receiving 10% of every Kindle book purchased on Kindle devices sold by the bookstore for the first two years after a customer buys a device.

Mobile

• Numbers for Q3 of smartphone sales are out. According to Strategy Analytics, there were a total of 251 million units sold last quarter, up 45% from the same time last year. Android runs on 81% of them, iOS on 13% and Windows Phone on 4%. Microsoft’s share has doubled year - over - year and this is the first quarter when it managed to sell more than 10 million devices. The growth is likely coming from the emerging markets and the lower - end of the Lumia line, which features devices such as the Lumia 510 and 610.

• Canalys, another research firm, adds country granularity and reports that Windows Phone achieved 2nd place in 19 countries: Finland (39%), Vietnam (16%), Italy (15%), Thailand (11%), Turkey (11%) and Russia (8%). In terms of screen sizes, Canalys also reports that shipments of large devices of 5 inch and above reached their highest level with 22% of shipments (56 million units). 66% of the 56 million had a 5 inch display, 31% had between 5 and 6 inch, and just 3% had 6 inch or larger screens. Canalys expects that the form factor between 4.1 and 5 inch to be most popular in 2014.

• Android version distribution numbers for November put Jelly Bean at 52%, split between v4.1 at 37%, v4.2 at 12% and v4.3 at 2%. Gingerbread is the second most popular version, with 26% and Ice Cream Sandwich the third with almost 20%.

• Version 4.4 of Android, KitKat, was released, with focus on optimising the OS for lower - end devices. They include lower memory requirements for the platform as well as the generic and Google apps, as well as an API for 3rd - party developers, where they can find out what are the memory specifications of a device so they can serve optimised code. In the effort to achieve less fragmentation and have one major version across the entire Android ecosystem, Google intends to maintain this release through-out next year. The other major category of changes in this new version of the platform is deeper integration of Google applications: Google Now can also be accessed through a swipe from the home screen and an API for deep linking for Google Search directly from applications has been created. Further, Hangouts have been more closely integrated with the SMS / Messaging apps and Google search can also be accessed from the Dialer.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Firefox Beta brings new 'Home' design to Android, desktop version gains Firefox OS app manager
• Firefox 26 beta is out: Click to Play plugins by default, Firefox OS App Manager, and Home redesigned on Android
• Firefox's plugin-blocker slams into beta - but don't jump for joy, Flash haters
• Firefox Beta gets new Home design on Android

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week