Platform/2010-03-23

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Notices / Schedule

Firefox 3.6.2

• shipped yesterday, after a decision to accelerate the schedule
• beltzner will blog about the steps that led to this decision, and how we executed against it, a little later today
• additional vulnerabilities were also addressed in this release, but some won't be disclosed until 3.5.9 and 3.0.19 ship as well

Firefox 3.0.19 / Firefox 3.5.9

• still shipping on our original March 30th schedule

Firefox 3.5.10 / Firefox 3.6.3

• schedule coming soon
• need to co-ordinate with bsmedberg to see if it will be the target for OOPP/Lorentz, expecting that to be the case

• Thanks to some releng work, the bulk of stranded 3.7a1 & 3.7a2 testers have been moved up to to alpha 3. Yesterday we had the following Active Daily User counts running something close next releases
  • 20,024 3.6.3pre
  • 13,696 3.7a3
  • 13,437 3.7a4pre

• Next alpha scheduled for codefreeze Friday. Known improvements include
  • resizable textareas by default
  • more asynchronous I/O (cookies)
  • faster x86-Linux builds with -fomit-frame-pointer (pending)
  • download progress shown in Windows 7 taskbar

Browser / Front End

You can always see the state of Firefox projects on our tracking page.

Some recent work:

• adw's been running preliminary experiments on the potential benefits of using sqlite's full text search extensions to speed up awesomebar queries
• EM API and UI work now in code review.
• Felipe's got updated patch + try server builds for his work on supporting multi-touch. bug 508906. He also has a great blog post about writing clearer mochitests when async work is involved. (Props to sdwilsh for the technique).
• Lookit that! Vlad's got Fennec on an Android
• Theme work coming on strong. Tab strip is now a toolbar bug 347930, Rob Arnold is getting us closer to a properly functioning glass implementation (see, e.g., bug 450767)

If you want an RSS feed full of Firefox awesomeness like this, check out planet firefox.

GFX Update

• A bunch of Aero Peek tab preview bugs have landed over the past few weeks, making it much more usable.

Hardware Acceleration Update

• OpenGL layers backend up and running [Bas]
• Patches in flight to change PLANAR_YCBCR interface a little, adding a "picture rect" [doublec]
• Other tweaks to layers API for retained layers [roc]

Layout Update

• 5% Tp4 win on Windows, due to font refactoring [jfkthame]
• Looking at IE9 tests to see what we should fix [jwatt, zwol]

Other news:

• Harfbuzz integration patches up for review [jfkthame]
  • Will enable performance analysis/improvement and new CSS font-variant features
• replacement of frame property system up for review [roc]
• New Ogg decoder being updated for review comments [cpearce et al]
• SVG animation of CSS mapped attributes landed [dholbert]

Content Update

• CPOW landing in the e10s tree (later today, most likely) (bnewman)
• evalInSandbox() is getting easier to use safely (mrbkap)

Electrolysis

• OOPP beta coming very soon
  • need reviews bug 526393:roc, bug 544936:ted, bug 554214:gavin

• nsIWebProgressListener reviewed for fennec, will land soon (removes a lot of the Fennec hackery)

Startup Performance

(Dietrich's out this week - startup table is still here. More updates next week)

Security

• CanSecWest's PwnToOwn contest this week

Breakpad

• Updated Breakpad snapshot in mozilla-central, picked up Linux/ARM + Linux/x86-64 support - bug 548113 (followup bugs noted there)
• Soccoro needs to rebuild their minidump processor, so it can understand the new information: bug 554019
• Then we can switch to DWARF on Linux: bug 554024, bug 554131
• Then we can enable -fomit-frame-pointer on Linux: bug 554364
• And enable crash dumping on x86_64 and ARM Linux: bug 554021.
• I'm still working on the Mac dumper.

Tree Management

• Still having graph server woes. Help is needed to debug application code!
• Work on having unittests run on our farm of talos minis is progressing.
  • Working on Leopard. Mostly working on Snow Leopard (some bugs filed)
  • WinXP / Win7 is blocked on changing test packaging format (use .zip instead of .tar.bz2)
  • Several issues on Linux being investigated.
• More N900's coming online for mobile tests
• First time doing alpha -> alpha update! Great work by bhearsum
• bug 513854 landed, hopefully will reduce some tinderbox flake. http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6880df5b2a3c
• FF3.7a4: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554392

Roundtable

• Everyone is awesome. Keep up the good work!
• Stuart's blog post about windows mobile