Hey friends. It’s issue 31 of the Weekly Engineering Newsletter where I do my best to give you all the week’s developer news in 500 words or less. I’m a day late but still here so that’s sort of a win.
What a week it’s been.
*What You Need To Know Right Now*
These trains run on time!
*Planning Update*
Development of Firefox 9 on mozilla-central is already well underway with about 100 change sets landing in the first three days of the new cycle.
On Tuesday [2011-08-16] morning, the ~3,000 change sets that you all have landed into mozilla-central over the last 6 weeks were uplifted to Aurora. This was the largest of the 4 rapid release migrations from m-c that we’ve had. Firefox 8 is gonna rock!
Migration day was also kind to Beta. We uplifted more than 2,400 change sets from Aurora to Beta. Among these Firefox 7 changes are some amazing memory improvements. When this makes it to users in just under 6 weeks, Mozilla will re-take the memory efficiency crown and give our users the highly responsive Firefox they deserve. Thanks to everyone in the mem-shrink effort for making this happen.
And, it seems worth noting also that we shipped Firefox 6. Cool.
*Must Read Blogs & News*
Armen Zambrano Gasparnian — Go Faster: improved download times for test jobs and merged few talos suites together
http://armenzg.blogspot.com/2011/08/go-faster-improved-download-times-for.html
Laura Thomson — Rapid releases: one webdev’s perspective
http://www.laurathomson.com/2011/08/rapid-releases-one-webdevs-perspective/
Nicholas Nethercote — MemShrink progress, week 9
http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/17/memshrink-progress-week-9/
Gavin Sharp — How you can help make Firefox multi-process friendly
http://www.gavinsharp.com/blog/2011/08/16/how-you-can-help-make-firefox-multi-process-friendly/
Benjamin Smedberg — Help improve Firefox power usage!
http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2011-08-16/help-improve-firefox-power-usage/
Katherine Noyes, PCWorld — Firefox Numbering Debate Is a Tempest in a Teapot
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/238412/firefox_numbering_debate_is_a_tempest_in_a_teapot.html
*Cool Features & Fixes*
Two-finger swipe on Mac OS X Lion is much improved with the changes landed at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678891 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678607
The Prefs and Find bar visual regression is fixed at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677091
The Orion editor has been turned on for Scratchpad on m-c at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679475
*Meetings I Went To So You Didn’t Have To*
Weekly Firefox/Gecko Development Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2011-08-16
Weekly Product Planning Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2011-08-17
Thrice-Weekly Aurora Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Aurora/2011-08-16
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Aurora/2011-08-18
Weekly Beta Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Beta/2011-08-15
