Firefox/Planning/2011-12-14

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde 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

Actions from Last Week

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 8)

Beta (9)

Aurora (10)

• Silent update
  • Add-ons are now compatible by default on Aurora. See Help Test Default Compatibility for Add-ons on Aurora This feature is “At Risk” because of how late it came in. We NEED HELP testing this.

Nightly (11)

• Silent update
  • Still working on security issues for Removal of OS security dialog for Windows

• Snappy weekly summary available here
  • Most of the responsiveness profiler landed
  • Received input from SUMO, UX, and networking teams.

Firefox Mobile

Nightly (11)

• Landed some new things
  • New about:home
  • Better search/go behavior in URLbar
  • Backend for local history/bookmarks
  • Web content clipboard menu for textboxes

• Regressions
  • Updater is broken
  • Panning is broken

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10:
  • Improving Sync Set Up – Went into Aurora. w.m.o product page updated. See here.
• Firefox 11+:
  • Java Porting for Sync – is in progress, hand off to mobile this week
    • strings for sync will likely not freeze until mid january
    • Note to developers: Native Sync behavior is undefined if you have multiple fennecs on your device.
  • Favicon Sync – will not make ffx 11.
  • Addon Sync – In development. landing in ffx 11.
• removed 3.6 addon from amo. the servers will still honor existing 3.6 addons.

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Release (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• No issues to report

Stabilization (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Spun 1.4b1 last week
• Will spin 1.4b2 today
• We still need more folks testing this release!
• Still on-track to release 1.4 on January 10, 2012

Development (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Jetpack Q4 goals are all on track to land in dev branch
• Jeff Griffiths wrote a blog post on our performance testing, including how you can help us test before we get it automated
• Louis-Remi Babe wrote two excellent posts on working with content scripts in the SDK and using jQuery in content scripts.
• Still on-track to merge to Stabilization on January 10, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop:

Same issues as last week but volume is down 30% from release. Top issues are:

• Malware/search hijacking (see my email this morning!)
• Outlook web access
• Google toolbar requests (possibly related to 3.6 update)
• Complaints about new Firefox UI (ditto)

Beta:

• Maybe slower/freezier/not-respondier(?)
• Maybe something related to youtube/flash
• Facebook chat issues (although this seems on and off). Also “can’t open facebook”.

Also:

SUMO Day is going to happen week today to cover 9.0 release.

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Web Technology

Amazon

• The Kindle Fire, while selling well, has underwhelmed reviewers of both its hardware and software. The new Silk proxy browser that was bundled with the device also did not offer any speed improvements over regular “unaccelerated” browsing; even Amazon’s own website loads more slowly in “accelerated” mode. Amazon is promising a software update within the next two weeks to address some of these issues. In a common criticism of Android-based tablets, critics also point out that because there are no profiles or parental controls, anyone with access to the device has full access to all content and one-click ordering to everything Amazon sells. Despite this, Amazon is still expected to ship ~4m units by the end of the year and is continuing to grow the Silk team, recently advertising for engineers to work on SPDY.

Google

• In a blog post celebrating the 10 billionth application download from the Android market, Google noted that there are “100 million words translated every week in 200 different countries” with the service.

• Google made a much more public announcement regarding their Pepper API/Native Client strategy by staging a promotional event last week. “Bastion” an award-winning role-playing game from Supergiant Games, has been ported to the interface and works well in Chrome. In the presentation a developer noted that the port to NaCL took one developer about two weeks to accomplish. The Unity and Moai gaming engines have also been ported, but more significantly so has Mono, an open-source version of Microsoft’s .NET platform. These changes have also been integrated into Google Chrome’s web store, which allows easy monetization for applications.

• Google’s push to turn Chrome into a fully cloud-based OS also took a step forward when user profiles, initially unencrypted or password-protected, were released in the stable channel, along with the Firefox Sync equivalent: “Sign in to Chrome”.

• Farther upstream in Chromium, code to support an HTML5 terminal emulator landed.

• Sencha conducted an in-depth review of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as a platform for HTML5 development and said that it is “a major step forward, but still falls short of iOS5”, noting that the Android Browser still does not support technologies like History Management, Web Sockets, and Web Workers. They did give it, however, high marks for fully supporting inline HTML5 video and audio.

WebKit

• WebKit now supports animations between background, border and list images. On Safari, the *video* tag can now prevent the hardware from going into sleep mode on OS/X, and work on GPU-accelerated SVG filters has begun.

Tizen

• The Intel, Samsung, Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation-sponsored replacement for Meego, Tizen, had its first Developer Summit in Beijing last weekend. It appeared to be sparsely attended and much of the discussion in the press revolved around the still-unclear implications of HP’s announcement last week that it would be open-sourcing WebOS.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• The Android Market reached 10 billion application downloads

• EU regulators suspended review of the Motorola acquisition by Google to wait for more information on its potential of harming competition between Android OEMs

• HP will keep maintaining WebOS and transfer it to an open source license

• Sony Ericsson becomes Sony middle of 2012

• Amazon partnered with a mobile payment services provider

• Carrier IQ published clarifications of the behaviour of the app

• The first Nokia WP7 device in the US will be the Nokia Lumia 710

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Firefox add-ons automatically back up whatever you type
• The Always Up-to-Date Power User’s Guide to Firefox
• Firefox Gains Weight, Challenging Its Developers

The Mozilla Firefox Challenge: http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2011/12/13/join-us-in-the-mozilla-firefox-challenge-this-holiday-season/

Upcoming mobile campaigns:

• SEM and display ad campaign for Firefox on tablets [TBD live date, ~Dec 20-26]
• Firefox for Android tablet video [Live Dec 20 on blog post]
• mozilla.org/mobile redesign (Bug 699985) to include tablets and more value props [Live Dec 20]
• FB ads [Live 1st week of Jan]
• mozilla.org/firefox/fx promo to feature tablets [Live Dec 20]

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Next meeting January 4
• QA-oriented tracking status flags — any feedback/objections? (ashughes)
  • Whiteboard: [qa-][qa+][qa?][qa!][qa!:N] — current policy, clutters the whiteboard
  • status-firefoxN:verified — potentially breaks queries tracking status-firefoxN:fixed
  • qa-firefoxN:?, -, +, verified — potentially leads to flag clutter

Actions this week

• Lawrence will follow up about add-ons default to compatible on mobile