Platform/2009-11-24

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Notices / Schedule

Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6

• in QA, on track for mid-December release

Firefox 3.0.17 / Firefox 3.5.7

• no schedule for either release yet, should have one by the end of the week
• tree should open in early December

Firefox 3.6 Beta

• beta user base is now over 450,000
• beta 3 refresh shipped last week
• component lockdown effects?

Firefox 3.6 RC

• late on RC freeze

Blocker Report

See more Firefox 3.6 related blocker queries, or learn about the new status and blocker flags

• Release Blockers (flag: blocking1.9.2 or blocking-firefox3.6)
  • 46 OPEN (-51 w/w)
  • 23 FIXED but not yet fixed on mozilla-1.9.2 (-8 w/w)
  • 12 nominations (-21 w/w)
  • Handy charts: Blocker snapshots, Blocker and Noms trends
• Approvals
  • 100 requests (-11 w/w)
  • 7 approved but not yet fixed on mozilla-1.9.2 (-10 w/w)
  • Charts: Nominations snapshots

Browser / Front End

(Progress reports every weekend on Planet Firefox)

• see our active projects and get involved / propose others
• Namoroka/mozilla-1.9.2 front end development:
  • 8 blockers left, 4 are crashkill
  • bug 520535 needs a patch
  • the other three need review (Neil Rashbrook is sick, Neil Deakin is out)
  • should be done in next 24 hours
  • keeping nomination list down with constant review, so far no major concerns other than late breaking Toolkit dependencies coming in from Fennec

GFX Update

• 2 blockers; one is waiting on review, the other is a mobile blocker (kerning) that has not seen traction yet.
• 2 noms; 1 might be build config related and if so should not block, the other has a reviewed patch and probably shouldn't block, but should be approved.
• Jonathan Kew's font enumeration Ts patch is looking good, and has passed review from John Daggett.
• And now, for the Direct2D in Firefox show, starring Bas Schouten!
  • Bas's blog post on Direct2D was featured in a cnet news article on Direct2D in Firefox.
  • Direct2D provides vector graphics rendering on the GPU. It is implemented as a backend to cairo.
  • Large performance improvements in scrolling.
  • Large improvements in dynamic websites using a lot of transformations and blending operations.
  • Possible implementation strategies:
    • Switched on for all D3D10+ cards, blacklist buggy hardware.
    • Switch off by default, whitelist hardware/driver versions.
    • Possibly additionally whitelist D3D9 cards.
• bug 470440 Going to implement sub-pixel positioned text rendering on Linux, hoping to have working code by early next week

Layout Update

• Blocker report
  • Several blockers added and fixed in the last week
  • 1 nomination (arrived 30 minutes ago)
  • 3 blockers with patches
  • 1 crashkill (not a hard blocker IMHO)
• Still evaluating crashes revealed by frame poisoning
  • Largest-volume crash fixed, probably fixes for one or two others
  • Most have no steps to reproduce, some seem inexplicable
  • Need a judgment call on remaining volume
• Video on N900
  • Theorarm decodes 100fps on "reasonably sized video", beating current DSP decoder (on speed if not power)
  • Plan on using GL for YUV decoding, not this quarter
  • Experiment with standalone player
  • Pulseaudio takes 10-15% of CPU!
• Instructions for setting up record and replay
  • Any particular test we should look at?
  • Need Windows loopback interface sniffing

Content Update

• One blocker left (security bug)
• Ben Newman got JPW talking across processes.
• Jonas Sicking went through and caught up with the spec and cleaned up some minor problems in our new DOM file API additions.
• Continuing with crashkill work
• HTML5 parser update (hsivonen)

JS

• Blockers:
  • Some fixed on TM tree, one test failure after m-c merge holding things up
  • Merging to 1.9.2 ongoing
  • Many new fuzzbug / QA bugs recently
  • JS team will meet to discuss each JS blocker at 2pm PST

Startup Performance

Summmary

• Read the latest weekly update.
• View snapshot results for startup and all other tests.
  • bug 517804 was a big win for Mac warm startup, putting 3.6 at 35% faster than 3.5.

Activity

• Joel has some data on his super-static Firefox in bug 525013. Inconclusive so far.
• Ben is making progress on the fastload replacement in bug 520309. Some fastload/invalidation discussion in this dev.platform thread.
• Taras has patches up for service caching (bug 516085
• Super-fast-path-ing of Components.* needs some JS team help: (bug 512584).
• Looks like a final patch on bug 519445, for reducing Mac startup time spent in font system initialization.
• Ryan Flint put a patch to minify JS on bug 524858, needs work still, but significantly reduces the size of shipped JS files.

More

• More details on the project page.
• Join us on IRC in #startup.

Security

pending reviews

feature	review date	who	interested
Windows TSF integration (1.9.2)	unscheduled	Jim Chen, roc
DNS Prefetching	unscheduled	Patrick McManus	Jesse, bz, reed(?), ctalbert
New system metrics (and media queries)	unscheduled	?	dbaron

Top Security Bugs

Session Cookie Policies

• Lucas filed bug 530594 to propose that we forcibly expire session cookies after 7 days; we need feedback from people here and from web developers
• also wondering if we should have an explicit option to always expire session cookies whenever the browser quits, even if the user chooses to save tabs or if there is a restart for add-on or application install/update.
• Related bugs:
  • bug 529899 to have session restore not save session cookies if the user has set Firefox to expire all cookies on shutdown
  • bug 529644 is about rewording the "Save and Quit" dialog to explain that session cookies will be preserved

Tree Management

• Downtimes
  • Try server repo needs resetting. Will be down for around 1 hour. Tomorrow night or next tuesday.

• b4 / rc1 scheduling

Roundtable

• we think we've fixed a sigificant number of the 3.6b3 topcrashes (see Sam's nice table) (dbaron)