Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08

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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

• Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

• We plan to ship 10.0.1 (both mainline and ESR) with the following changeset this Friday (2/10): 18ce5e304e97

Beta (11)

• Barring unexpected issues, Firefox 11 Beta 2 will ship this Friday (2/10)

Aurora (12)

• Aurora 12 desktop was out to testers as of 2/3

• Aurora 12 mobile was out to testers as of 2/7

Nightly (13)

• Safebrowsing move from SQLite to flat file landed (bug 673470)

• Telemetry dashboard is now public! See Taras’ presentation for access details.

• If you’re seeing long hangs on Aurora 12 or Nightly 13, please comment in bug 725110

• Safe Mode: Auto detect previous start-up failure and offer to start in safe mode bug 294260

• [New Tab Page] Set to enabled by default on Nightly bug 716538

Firefox Mobile

• No mobile beta this week
  • We are holding for performance issues

  • Schedule is being reworked
• Hi, Chrome on Android
  • We will be adding Chrome to our competitive testing

  • Solid beta, but not intimidating

Firefox Sync

• Sync now has a Product Marketing Manager. Welcome to Greg Jost!

• Native Sync
  • did not go to Beta, along with native fennec

  • Please file bugs. Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
  • We have daily bug triage at 4pm
  • You can find us on irc, #androidsync
  • Old news that bears repeating
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

    • Migration from XUL to Native may cause your sync account to disappear
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
• Work has started on integrating BrowserID into Sync authentication
  • The two sync systems will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
• Coming to a release near you
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing

  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11 (aka Beta): Addon Sync
  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora (but not Beta)

Add-on Builder

• release today

• shooting new tutorial today
• all systems are still GO for launch next Wednesday February 15th

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Found a nasty and released 1.4.3
  • Important for developers using simple-prefs, simple-storage, or passwords APIs to take a look at:

  • Blog post explaining issue and fix
  • We wrote a module to help anyone affected “recover”

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Spun 1.5RC1 yesterday

• Get started writing add-ons for Adnroid!
• Still on track to release Feb 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Add-on of the week!

• Andrew Sutherland has written an SDK-based add-on called about:nosy to show “about:memory with charts, helps you lay blame more easily”

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 10:

• AVG killing the enter button in the address bar. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]

• RealPlayer Video Downloader doesn’t work [12][13][14]
• Norton isn’t compatible [15][16][17][18][19]
• Can’t highlight/select text areas/missing cursor: [20][21][22][23][24][25]
• Startup crashes [26][27]
• General crashiness: [28][29][30]
• We changed arrow keys to scroll 3 lines rather than 1: [31][32]
• Extensions hidden/lost: [33]
• Some HTTPs connections turning into connection reset: [34][35] — looks related to non-standard ports (used by internal services/routers)

Mobile

• FF10 Android market feedback is consistent with previous XUL releases (performance and flash are top issues). NativeUI will fix both of these problems.

SUMO Days update:

• We started SUMO Days on Nov 3rd and we answered 58% of the questions asked that first day.

• We’ve been working to grow the contributors to our support forum and improve the SUMO web content every two weeks since.
• Last week, we answered 81% of the questions asked and we’ve made a big improvement in the overall average of questions answered. So, huge congrats to the SUMO contributors for their hard work to optimize the site content and get us on a path to answering every user question every day.

UX & User Research

Research

• The Mobile Diary project is now in the hands of our users. The project will help us learn more about user attitudes, behaviors, and use cases. If you want to get an in-depth look at user needs, consider attending a participant interview, scheduled in the SF Bay area on Feb 15-16, 18-19, and 21st. Get in touch with Mary Trombley if you’re interested.

Design

• Australis project:
  • Tab Strip Visual Redesign

  • Features/Desktop/Panel Menu
  • Toolbar Customization
  • Arrow Panel Redesign
• Translation designs in progress
• Metro UI (Win design in progress
• URL Autocomplete landed! Then disabled! Then hopefully enabled again! (might change to only complete for previously typed entries)
• New download manager still awaiting landing
• New tab refinements continuing, enabled by default, give us feedback!
• Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• Google released a beta of Chrome for Android, based on a fork of the Chromium code (version 16.0.915.75). A major focus for the development team is to re-merge the trees; some of the work has been done. Because of the Java base of Android, a lot of work using Java Native Interfaces will have to be done, no doubt to improve device support.

• Chrome for Android also has integrated support for a mobile remote debugger, allowing developers to debug or profile their mobile web pages and web apps using a desktop machine. Here’s a screencast demo. Developers are encouraged to ask questions on stackoverflow.com.

• Google announced that Chrome would soon stop conducting SSL online revocation checks, using its existing software processes to distribute lists of revoked certificates.

• The German government, in a general list of recommendations for computer security, recommended the Google Chrome browser, primarily because of its sandbox architecture.

• Development versions of Chrome now feature a new Settings UI that is fluid and appears to make use of graphic acceleration; see the video at the link for a demo.

• The Dev version also now has partial support for Web Intents — here’s a screenshot.

Microsoft

• The Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be released on February 29 at Mobile World Congress.

• The IE team’s blog posted a detailed summary of the upcoming support of CSS3 3D transforms, with some interesting demos.

• In a related post, the team drew attention to the fact that IE10 embedded in Metro apps will have the same performance, unlike similar apps on iOS, which run more than three times as slow.

• MSIE 10 will offer compressed proxy browsing.

Opera

• The W3C blog posted an interview with two members of the Opera team. They said among other things that Opera Mini’s proxy browsing / compression features make it so popular with users in developing regions that carriers use it in their advertising. There’s also an interesting summary of their vision for HTML5 on television sets.

Other

• RIM has announced that all the code in their SDK for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform will be open sourced. Code is available at http://blackberry.github.com and development of the HTML5 SDK is happening in the open there.

• There’s a proposal at the W3C for the next version of HTML to support accessing image metadata in the DOM.

• Strangeloop Networks released a “State of the Internet” report that indicates that while the average site is 10% faster than it was a year ago, top-ranked sites are getting bigger and slower, with the average home page containing 98 objects.

Mobile

This week we are talking about Chrome for Android beta. Summary below, detailed report in your inbox.

• Yesterday Google launched Chrome for Android beta, as a first step towards making Chrome the standard browser for Android version 4 and above. The release supports Ice Cream Sandwich, ARMv7-based devices, which currently make 1% of the Android install base and account for a 3 million addressable base.

• The browser is based on Chrome v16 and V8 v3.8 and has a multi-process architecture similar to the desktop version. It does not have plug-in support, and lack of Flash in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market. An Android Central poll asking “Is a lack of Flash support on the mobile browser a deal-breaker?” has 47% of Yes answers and 52% of No.

• Its UA String is: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-US; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) CrMo/16.0.912.75 Mobile Safari/535.7)

• Speed, simplicity and personal are its main user propositions, while tab management, user data sync, the Omnibox and its multi-process architecture are the main promoted features. For developers, Chrome comes with a remote debugging via USB feature and boasts Web standards compliance, extensive HTML5 support and hardware acceleration.

• Its positioning speaks to speed, personalization and extension of the desktop. Branding is persistent in the product on the New Tab page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the desktop: friendly, light, easy-going, simple and straight to the point. Tagline is “Your Chrome, away from home.”

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Finishing 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads this week.

• Finalizing plans for next Firefox release.
• Finishing Up devices page and reworking content silos on mozilla.org/firefox and mozilla properties.

Mobile

• Re-visiting positioning and marketing plan for Firefox for Android

• Preparing for MWC
• Video for Firefox 11 launch

Press

• Mozilla’s Firefox 10 Muscles Up on Developer Tools

• Firefox 11 enters beta, brings add-on sync

• As Firefox 11 Hits Beta, Work Begins on Push Notifications for the Web

• Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox

• Coming to Firefox: Flash Player in a sandbox

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Do we have a plan for shipping Firefox 11 on patch Tuesday? If not, when/where will that be figured out? (bhearsum)
  • We will go manual only until we are comfortable unthrottling (late in the week of 3/11, or early in the week of 3/18)
• Update on feedback: HTTPs problem seems to be “connection reset” errors when connecting to servers on non-standard ports (may be self-signed cert specific)
• When should Push/BiPostal/Notifications appear as a product here? [ally]

Actions this week

• ally to coordinate with greg jost on sync uptake metrics, and measuring the impact of the FF10 usability changes

• laura to report on the state of persona/personas discussion
• cheng to report back on connection reset issues with SSL
• johnath to wrangle representation in this meeting for identity

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-01

« previous week | index | next week »

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

• Lawrence will follow up about add-ons default to compatible on mobile (Dec. 14)
  • Add-ons will default to compatible on mobile in Firefox 12 bug 719921

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

• The 1/31 merge for 11->Beta and 12->Aurora is now complete

Release (3.6, 10)

• Firefox 10, Firefox 3.6.26, and ESR 10 all shipped yesterday (1/31)
  • See the release notes here

Beta (11)

• Going to build with FF11 beta 1 today

Aurora (12)

• Silent update – Windows UAC service in now on Aurora – few patches left to land to complete this work

Nightly (13)

• Snappy – CC and GC fixes going in this week. More on what’s happening in Snappy on Taras’ blog

• bug 455553 “New Tab Page feature” landed
• bug 90268 “move plugins to content – plugins should withstand a reframe of the object frame” is fixed.
• bug 563318 “switch trunk builds to use Visual C++ 2010″ has happened

Telemetry proposal

• Opt-in rate has been low on Telemetry

• Want to collect more data earlier in the dev cycle
• Proposal to make Telemetry opt-out on Nightly and Aurora channels
  • Users will be prompted on first launch in the browser (existing users on first launch after opt-out starts) via a door hangar to inform that Mozilla is collecting data and to provide a link to more information including how to opt-out on these channels

  • about: dialogs will be updated to include a statement about data collection as well
• Telemetry will continue to be opt-in on Release and Beta
• Concerns can be added to bug 699806 or posted to dev.planning

Firefox Mobile

• ICS plugin support landed on trunk last night, it is awesome

• UA string changed
  • We are actively filing evangelism bugs now

  • File bugs in | Fennec Native / Evangelism |
• Native code and builds moved to Beta, but we are not “ready to ship”
  • Expect uplift from Aurora to Beta
• Start UX has improved and will continue to improve
• UI responsiveness has improved and will continue to improve
• AMO has added support for Native Fennec add-ons \o/

Firefox Sync

• has nothing new to report (as mobile will probably steal our thunder anyway :) )

• old news that bears repeating
  • Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora
    • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

    • It may consume excess battery
    • Migration from XUL to Native will likely cause your sync account to disappear
    • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• Release today

• v1.0 release remains on-track for February 15th
• Working with marketing on various v1.0 launch plans

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Made two hotfix releases last week(1.4.1 & 1.4.2). Both related to pushing 1.4 into Builder
  • Post-mortem tomorrow to figure out if we could have avoided either of these hotfixes.

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Released 1.5b3 yesterday

• Still on track to release on Feb. 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Still on track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Firefox 9:
  • Fast Video Downloader updated and broke 3.6 users: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/915355 (Jorge has disabled it for 3.6)

• Firefox 10:
  • Norton doesn’t work (supposedly it has an update but we’re still seeing input around Norton)

  • AVG breaks the address bar (can’t press enter, must click GO): [1] [2]
  • Some comments around hidden/vanishing extensions. : [3] [4]
  • Possibly issues uploading maybe this oneor this one

Mobile

• Sprinting for FF11 doc updates to support NativeUI

• Firefox for Android meetup in SF is tonight!
• SUMO day is tomorrow

UX & User Research

• Australis project has feature pages, is getting staffed:
  • Tab_Strip_Visual_Redesign

  • Features/Desktop/Panel_Menu
  • Toolbar_Customization
  • Arrow_Panel_Redesign
• Basic research on Translation feature done, designs coming soon
• Metro UI (Win design work in progress
• URL Autocomplete landed!
• New download manager about to land (and/or has landed), still some known issues
• New tab refinements continuing, landed on Nightly (preffed off)
• Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Opera

• Recent updates in the Dragonfly developer tool include better filtering in the Network Inspector, including both flow and table views of network requests, as well as some minor improvements to the Style Inspector.

• Opera also made some improvements in their address bar. It now weights the last visit, keyword positions, and number of matches when prioritizing possibilities.

Microsoft

• Perhaps due to their close proximity in the Seattle area, Amazon and Microsoft seem to have good relations. Notably, Amazon just released an SDK for their web services for the Windows Phone platform.

• Since the Windows 8 “Metro-style” version of MSIE will not support plugins, Microsoft posted some information about how websites can signal that their website will only work in the legacy/desktop mode by sending a specific HTTP header or meta tag.

• Microsoft also released IDBExplorer, a debugging tool for IndexedDB applications. It provides a tree view of DBs.

Google

• The Product Manager responsible for the Chromebook confirmed that while Google plans to continue to streamline its product offerings, the Chromebook is seen as a long-term play and will continue to receive investment for the foreseeable future.

• The Chromium team released the Javascript to Dart Synonym app, which allows Javascript developers to easily understand how to “translate” their Javascript applications into Dart.

• Google also released more information, targeted at users, about how the newly-improved Safe Browsing feature works. It “now analyses properties of each page you visit to determine the likelihood of it being a phishing page.” When the likelihood is higher than a certain level, it sends the URL to Google for further analysis.

• The dev version of Google Chrome now partially exposes users’ privacy preferences to extension developers.

• As discussed some weeks ago, Chrome now supports Google’s proposed “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields; it allows web developers to unambiguously identify fields as “name”, “street-address”, etc.

Webkit

• Interesting presentation: At a recent Javascript conference, Matt Seeley, a senior Netflix developer described how they work with an embedded version of Webkit in their product, which is now available in more than 450 low and high-end devices in more than 40 countries.

• Other recent additions to the WeKit codebase include an extension API providing information about screen brightness, and a debug page for Omnibox. The WebKit team is also building a performance test reporting system, using Mozilla’s graph server.

HTML5/ Video

• LongTail Video released their State of HTML5 Video report, showing that across both desktop and mobile, more than 2/3 of browsers support HTML5, with the remainder largely made up of MSIE 6,7, and 8. The report also summarizes the current level of support for various video tag attributes. Currently only Google Chrome and Opera support all of them. Other areas summarized include accessibility, adaptive playback and fullscreen support.

• A group of HTML5 evangelists have put together html5please.us, which summarizes the information behind sites like http://caniuse.com to present clear, actionable recommendations on which HTML5 features should be used or avoided, based on the breadth and depth of support across all browsers.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Android tablet sales reached 10.5 million units in Q4 of 2011 and accounted for 39% of global tablet market

• 5 – 6 million Kindle Fire tablets were sold in Q4 2011, but not generating profits for Amazon

• Apple might have become the top smartphone producer in Q4 2011, in close competition with Samsung

• The European Commission opened a formal investigation into Samsung’s use of its rights to essential 3G wireless patents

• ARM had very good results in Q4 2011, but facing increased competition from Intel

• Open WebOS 1.0 to be released in September

• Nokia celebrated the sale of the 1.5 billionth Series 40 phone

• A bill concerning the installation of monitoring software on mobile phones by carriers and OEMs has been proposed in the US

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• Continuing to localize improved 3.6 upgrade billboards

• Working on marketing plans for next Firefox
• Putting collateral together for Aurora and Beta later this week.

Mobile

• Beta Snippets

• Beta FB ads
• Updating collateral on Beta pages

Press

• Firefox simplifies add-on updates; no native Android interface–yet

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

• Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-25

« previous week | index | next week »

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, 9)

• 3.6.26 to be released to the beta population tomorrow, subsequently released next Tuesday

Beta (10)

• Pushing our final beta out tomorrow, and plan to release on Tuesday

• Add-ons default to compatible is in Firefox 10. Add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4+ will be compatible in Firefox 10.
• Add-on hotfix testing is in Firefox 10 and testing is going well with our beta audience – once the metrics team helps verify our understanding of the data we’ve gotten back, we can greenlight the use of a hotfix in the place of some chemspills

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

• bug 566489: inline autocomplete has landed thanks to efforts from David Dahl and Marco Bonardo. Marco has been fixing followups in an attempt to polish the feature for release, but we may end up disabling it on Aurora to get some extra bake time.

• Snappy (last week’s summary)
  • Smooth scrolling has landed (bug 198964)

Firefox Mobile

• Working toward Beta

• Current status blog post

• Nightly

• Aurora
  • not to steal sync’s thunder, but we expect sync to be uplifted by the end of the week

  • several non-sync patches are dependent on sync landing, so will get unblocked by that
• Beta
  • when 11 goes to beta, we’ll be doing a split release
    • incompatibility needs to be built into the manifests

    • manifests patches are based on branding, should land soon
    • RelEng and QA are conducting testing with a dummy market product to validate all these moving pieces
• Release

Firefox Sync

• Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly
  • Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles

  • Migration from XUL to Native will likely cause your sync account to disappear
    • mobile is investigating a fix
  • Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
• The sync team is planning to migrate our code base to MPL v2.0
  • Please holler if there is any reason we should not.
• old news that bears repeating
  • Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
    • You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
  • Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• Release today

• Next week we begin intensive QA rounds in preparation for release
• Marketing/PR is assigning someone to handle our 1.0 launch
• 1st Web Builder code check-in happened this week, hoping to have a working prototype in ~5 weeks

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• 1.4 Released two weeks ago – no issues

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• 1.5b2 Released yesterday

• On track to release on Feb. 21st, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Have made good progress on Talos testing – jhammel blogged about it

• Still having discussion of localizing html elements in SDK-based addons – please join in
• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21st, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Follow up from last week:
  • [1] Slowness in 10 peaked (although not much of one) around the 8th and has been falling (a little) since.

Firefox 9.0.1

• Nothing major new.

• Some complaints around 3.6 > 9 major update (where is reload button, confusion around session restore, extensions)

Mobile

UX & User Research

Research: The Mobile Diary Project is progressing nicely. We are in the process of recruiting participants to tell us how they use apps and how they use the browser. There will be opportunities for you to meet with these mobile users coming up in mid-February. Email Mary Trombley if you have questions.

Design

• New ux-review@mozilla.com UI review queue is being beat into submission on a daily basis
  • We reduced the number of uiwanted’s from 420 to 316 (104 bugs processed) last week, racing towards zero!
• Metro UI design work is starting, and we know what we can (and can’t) do wrt. WinRT and Win32 APIs
• Trond & Josh hard at work for Gaia (B2G) UI for Mobile World Congress
• Sync “papercut” fixes are in progress (Yuan and Jinghua)
• Designs on BrowserID, log in to the browser + next-generation sync approach is starting this week (Zhenshuo)
• zpao landed Lion fullscreen mode on the UX branch, is epic
• New tab page has visual improvements (Boriss & ttaubert)
• Design work on translation of content in-browser is starting this week too (Yuan)

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Microsoft

• There continue to be persistent rumours that Microsoft is planning to have a unified platform from the OS kernel up for Windows 8, “not just in terms of a common design language and interface (Metro), the same HTML5 Internet Explorer browser and integration with Windows Live and Azure — but also in terms of a common core.”

• Other rumours indicate that the next release of Windows 8 will be called a consumer preview, not “beta”. Interviews with developers who have recently built apps on the current Developer Preview said, overall, that it is still rough, with plenty of missing functionality, but that they found it possible to build the apps they wanted.

• Microsoft also released an updated version of Compat Inspector that works with the IE10 Preview. This tool allows webmasters to identify changes that are required to better serve IE9 and IE10.

Google

• An interesting blog post details a claim that the primary reason Google decided to create the Chrome browser was to perfect technologies required to better crawl the web, all in an effort to improve search rankings. By citing patent applications, the author makes the claim that “GoogleBot is a browser”.

• Google released some advertising videos promoting the automatic translation capabilities of Chrome.

• Recent WebKit / Chrome developments include a screen-size emulation back-end in the Web Inspector tool, which will soon allow for easy emulation of mobile device screens, and the first commits to support the Shadow DOM in Javascript.

• Web RTC is now in Google Chrome’s dev channel.

• Google also awarded $6133.70 in rewards to teams reporting four security bugs in Chrome; all four are fixed in the latest stable version of the browser.

Opera

• Opera’s Dragonfly editing tool now features dynamic Javascript value inspection — hitting shift while clicking on an element will show its value in a tooltip.

Other

• At an upcoming security conference in Vancouver, separate teams of hackers will be competing to win $60,000 to take advantage of recently-patched vulnerabilities in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

• An interesting interview on the W3C blog with the head of the Financial Times’ web team on why they decided to abandon their iOS native client application and develop an HTML5 version instead. They describe some of the functionality they miss (notifications) and the workarounds they had to develop to handle additional caching and swiping functionality.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Dolphin HD will come preloaded with add-ons, reveals new beta release

• Sony Ericsson joins HTC and Motorola with low Q4 2011 results, but will revamp strategy as it becomes Sony

• HTC to integrate IBM business solutions on devices in effort to consolidate on the enterprise market

• Apple on path to 20% smartphone sales marketshare for 2011 after record Q4 2011 results

• Quad-core 1.5 GHz devices on their way, by Samsung

• Mobile payments rushing towards mainstream availability in the US and Europe

• RIM has a new CEO, no strategic changes are planned

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Every moment counts in Mozilla’s bid for mobile relevance

• Mozilla releases Rust 0.1, the language that will eventually usurp Firefox’s C++

• Mozilla ‘crowdsourcing’ State of the Union address

• Mozilla’s Anti-SOPA Message Reached 40 Million People

Desktop

• 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads in progress, working on updating copy on Major Update billboard to improve CTRs.

• Readying materials for the releases next week (Aurora, Beta, GA).
• Working on a devices landing page experiment for Mozilla.org/Firefox
• Marketing plan for next release.

Mobile

• Tablet media buy campaign ends this week (SEM efforts still live)

• Facebook ads for tablets ended yesterday
• MWC content and messaging
• Marketing plan for FF11
• Blog post for FF11 Beta
• Optimizing acquisition funnel for Aurora and Beta

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Will johnath close this meeting with an interpretive dance?

• [Michael Verdi] Maybe a better solution to recording the meeting is for the meeting owner to use the internal Vidyo recording capability and then make it it available.

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-18

« previous week | index | next week »

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, 9)

Beta (10)

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

Find in Page works a lot better bug 171237
Smooth scrolling is on by default bug 198963
Window frame size on Windows fixed bug 618353

Firefox Mobile

• Nightly
  • Sync is in!
• Aurora
  • working on a process to uplift from nightly to aurora

Firefox Sync

• services team is offsite 2012-01-18 & 2012-01-19

• Firefox Sync likely to be is enabled in Native Fennec soon.
  • History and bookmarks sync, tabs and passwords are TBD (will drop tabs if have to)
• The Sync Rapid Release Meeting was 2012-01-17
  • covered what has landed in Firefox 10, 11, 12, 13+, serverside, and internal improvements\
    • does not cover explicit list of fennec sync bugs or issues.
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Meetings/RapidRelease/2012-01-17
• old news that bears repeating
  • Addons being sync’ed in firefox 11: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Features/Addon_Sync

Add-on Builder

• The 1.0 Add-on Builder release date has been finalized, we’ll be launching the site on February 15th.

• There will be 1-2 more polish/hardening pushes before that date, with the final two weeks dedicated to extensive QA.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Released 1.4 last Tuesday, so far, so good.

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• should spin up 1.5b1 today or tomorrow

• beginnings of mobile work will be in 1.5
  • blog post soon about where we are starting with mobile
• 1.5 release on track for Feb. 20, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to merge to stabilization Feb 20, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 9

• Top issue: Yahoo messenger from Yahoo mail bug 713014

• Mac Netflix broken in 9 (fixed in 10) for 64-bit Firefox. bug 715396
• Possibly an issue with Ask toolbar breaking Flash (a couple people say using malware sweeper is needed to get rid of ask completely)
• Possibly an issue with plugin container getting stuck with 100% CPU

Firefox 10:

• A number of comments about speed/performance (a couple comments about shorter battery life)

• suomi24.fi (finnish email provider) compatibility
• Youtube problems (some people say crash, some say it hangs/stutters)

Mobile

• Updating all Firefox Mobile documentation for version 11

• SUMO Day is tomorrow (come on over and answer 10 questions if you dare)
• Two weeks from tonight, celebrate the NativeUI in SF

UX & User Research

• Starting Metro (Windows UI effort this week.

• Working with 4 students from MSU to move preferences in-content.
• Papercuts cleanup for Sync in preparation for MWC still ongoing.
• Q1 goals have been finalized, and will be posted shortly.

Market Insights

Desktop / Web Platform

Tizen

As the first Tizen SDK is examined more closely, some analysts are noting that it does not use the Wayland display server, as some had expected. There has also been a nine-minute video posted of a Tizen session inside the SDK’s emulator.

Sencha

Sencha announced that the latest version of its Animator tool now supports Firefox versions 7+.

Google

Google unveiled the Chromebox at the CES show in Las Vegas last week, a desktop version of the Chromebook. It is expected to use the new HTML5-based “window manager” called Aura, that provides a closer desktop experience. See the short demo video of Aura here.

Google Gmail released an updated version of their HTML5 web client, only available in the Google Chrome Web Store, that supports offline management of mail up to 31 days old.

Google Chrome

The Google Chrome security team made a formal post describing the core principles with which they approach security, signalling perhaps an increased focus on security in communications from the project.

The Chromium team is making an effort to ensure all tests in the MSIE Testcenter pass, marking their progress in this Google Docs spreadsheet.

W3C

The W3C has issued a call for comments for a Speech API

Gnome Epiphany

The GNOME project released GNOME 3.0, along with Epiphany 3.0, the default browser. It features WebkitGTK+ 1.4.0 and a number of UI refinements, including a completely reworked download UI.

WebKit

A “source” column has been added to the CSS Profiler, allowing web developers to exactly which line of which CSS file is responsible for performance issues. Two new CSS properties, font-kerning and font-variant-ligatures, were enabled. A patch from a web developer working for the Baidu search engine in China was also received.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Motorola and Intel entered a multiyear partnership to produce Intel-based Android devices

• CyanogenMod picking up among early-adopters, with the support of OEMs

• Samsung announced the intention to merge Bada and Tizen. no decision yet

• Nokia to reach a 11% smarthphone shipments marketshare in 2012, down to 8% in 2013

• Web-enabled feature phones picking up interest from phone vendors

• In 2010 an estimated 28% of all mobile handsets were smartphones in Western Europe, with an expected 37% in 2012 and 49% in 2015, reveals the European Mobile Observatory

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

• 3.6 Update Display ad campaign currently live in English, with more locales coming soon.

• Working on next Firefox update, including Firefox ESR, currently expected on Jan 31st.
• Firefox Aurora online display ads campaign.
• Ongoing – Firefox Aurora ads in Facebook
• Firefox Aurora SEM campaign going live this week.
• Firefox Aurora available in Affiliates Program
• Firefox Beta communications and messaging

Mobile

• Facebook ads for tablets (ja doing the best at 0.09% CTR, de/fr/singapore/us)

• Online media buy campaign for tablets ends this week – 82,000+ clicks delivered so far, analysis will be sent out after campaign ends
• SEM campaign launch for tablets pending
• Kicking off SEO efforts to streamline acquisition funnel
• Finalizing marketing plan proposal for FF11 launch
• native Fennec Beta communications and messaging
• Preparing for MWC

Public Relations

Google, Mozilla, Wikipedia Fight SOPA Piracy Bill

Mozilla, Firefox join anti-SOPA strike

Black Duck Software Names 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year

Has Firefox Lost Its Edge?

Questions, Comments, FYI

• Nobody voiced a concern over the last week about recording this meeting.

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-11

« previous week | index | next week »

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, 9)

• 3.6.26 security triage starting tomorrow

• Full unthrottling of FF9 to occur once we have a better understanding of bug 715396
• 3.6.25->9.0.1 advertised update planned for next week, will be announced once we’re fully unthrottled on FF9

Beta (10)

• Code freeze for FF10 is 2012-01-20

• Go to build for FF10 release candidate will be 2012-01-23
  • A decision about whether or not to ship add-ons compatible by default (and with what prefs set) will be made this same day
• Final sign-off for FF10 will be 2012-01-25
• Next source migration is 2012-01-31

Aurora (11)

Nightly (12)

Firefox Mobile

• Many patches are currently landing on Aurora
  • Drivers are doing a great job with granting/denying approvals in a timely manner
• Mobile is using tracking-fennec:11+ to track bugs that need to be considered for Firefox11 (native)
• User-agent discussion is happening in dev.planning

Firefox Sync

• BrowserID+sync project in the design phase
  • No longer targeting mobile world congress, or the fennec launch

  • What it means for user privacy, security, other projects still being worked out
• UI changes in 10 not deemed sufficient, a papercuts project is in design phase
  • So further changes will be made in 12+, the changes in 10 will remain unchanged (improvement, but still not good enough)
• 2012 roadmap is TBA
  • So if there’s something your team really wants from Sync, let us know
• Old News that bears repeating:
  • the big feature for firefox 10 is the UI overhaul

  • the big feature for firefox 11 is the Addon Sync engine
  • Native Sync is still in progress, it is not enabled in native fennec yet
    • Nota Bene: because of the intents methodology of android, more than one native sync/fennec install produces undefined sync behavior

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Released 1.4 (aka the Myk Melez Release) yesterday!
  • New Simple Prefs module comes courtesy of community members Hernan Colmeiro and Erik Vold

  • Brand new loader – new simplified XPI file structure
  • Loads of changes – please read the release notes!

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Merge from development branch happened yesterday

• All code switched to MPL 2!
• On track to release 1.5 February 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Jeff Hammel is going to help us get Talos testing up – expect that soon

• On track to merge to Stabilization February 21, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• New 9.0 issues:
  • [1] Netflix doesn’t work. Looks to be only 10.6 mac; may have to do with recent silverlight update.

  • tabbrowser.xml not responding [2] and [3] also happened in 8: [4]
  • Flash not working: [5] (may have to do with 64-bit flash?)
  • Lots of norton toolbar compatibility questions [6][7]
  • URL not valid complaints: [8][9]
  • Possibly more Java breakage: [10][11]
  • Some complaints that networks are slower with 9: [12][13]

• Existing known 9.0 issues:
  • Yahoo web-based IM

  • Bookmark icons

• Extended Support Release (ESR) was announced on the Mozilla Blog. First release should be Firefox 10, and final implementation details are being worked on with RelEng (bug 717106). Questions and/or comments are welcomed by kev (kev at mozilladotcom or kev on IRC)

Mobile

• Android market feedback on v9 continues to confirm that the NativeUI work to improve performance, stability, and add flash support will address a majority of 1 & 2 star reviews.

• SUMO questions about Firefox Mobile are up ~20% in the last couple of weeks, with a handful of Aurora questions starting to appear, mostly about features that are still being re-implemented in the new UI (find in page and sync).
• Input feedback for 9 and 10 beta is positive overall, with Flash support continuing to be a top issue.

UX & User Research

• Yuan is working with Jinghua to address papercuts in the Sync setup process before MWC.

• Draft of Q1 2012 goals have been posted to the main intranet goals page, will be finalized later this week
• Trond is in SF to work on Gaia (B2G) in the time leading up to MWC, say hi!

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Tizen

The Tizen initiative made an alpha release of the source code for the Tizen operating system, along with fairly detailed documentation of the Web API layer. Intel has now also officially joined as a member of the industry consortium.

In related news, Nokia purchased feature phone OS vendor Smarterphone this week.

Sencha

Sencha made an interesting blog post about their 2012 wishes for HTML5. They ranged from better support for media devices, improved audio support, better caching, a contacts API. Their number one wish was for a better mobile browser debugger.

Microsoft

It’s still not clear whether or not Microsoft is going to support “legacy” Desktop apps on ARM-based hardware (i.e. tablets). There are conflicting screenshots from demos and Microsoft has not yet made an official announcement on the matter.

Microsoft also made a detailed blog post about the upcoming support for additional OpenType features in CSS: options such as kerning, superscript and subscript, ornamental swashes, etc. Firefox had previously been the sole browser to support this since version 4.

Opera

Opera launched the Opera TV Store, an HTML5-based store solution for connected TVs, available for OEMs, developers and content providers. The solution includes an emulator and dedicated developer tools, and can be deployed on any set-top box, Blu-ray player or HD Ready TV.

Apple

Forrester Research predicts that Apple’s enterprise sales will increase 58% to $19b this year, and will double that again in 2013.

Google Chrome

The latest beta releases for Google Chrome have two important new features. Dynamic pre-rendering, based on heuristics and locally-stored data, of pages. When the browser is strongly confident that the user will click a particular link, it will preload and render the page. Another feature is that .exe and .msi downloads will automatically be scanned for viruses and trojans.

The latest beta channel for Chromebooks also offers support for OpenVPN connections.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Opera launched a HTML5-based app store solution for TVs

• The Dolphin browser was updated to 7.3 on Android and 3.0 on iOS

• Lenovo to launch first Intel-powered Android smartphone, the K800

• Samsung announced good Q4 2011 results, with 35 million smartphones sold

• Sony announced Xperia NXT, first Android smartphones without Ericsson

• HTC has had poor results in Q4 2011 results, selling less devices than Q3

• 1.67 billion phones will be sold this year, with 3G and 4G chipsets on more than half

• 16 out of the top 25 mobile companies by revenue are network operators

• Nokia confirmed North America focus and Lumia 900 device

• Nokia acquired Smarterphone, a producer of feature phone OS

Marketing and Public Reactions

• Mozilla Blog Post Announcing Firefox ESR

• Web Browser Grand Prix VIII: Chrome 16, Firefox 9, And Mac OS

• Firefox extended support will mitigate rapid release challenges

• Mozilla Gets Down to Business With Slow-Burn Firefox

• Mozilla Firefox Set to Get More Secure in 2012

Questions, Comments, FYI

• (Michael Verdi) What do y’all think about video recording and publishing these meetings for those that can’t be at them? I almost always attend this meeting and just realized it’s literally three clicks in my screencasting software to make this happen. Think about it. Let me know if you have concerns. Thanks.

• When will 3.6 MU be unthrottled?
  • Answer: next week with unthrottling of 9.
• When will UAC removal as part of silent update ship?
  • Answer: Firefox 12 with an asterisk.
• Why will we be possibly throttling Firefox 10 updates?
• Can johnath close this meeting with a cover of “Born This Way”?
• Can johnath close this meeting with an interpretive dance?
• Another potential vidyo room move (johnath)

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2012-01-04

« previous week | index | next week »

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, 9/9.0.1)

• 3.6.26 security triage starting this week, expect FF10 bugs to get poked

• The next checkpoint for unthrottling the Firefox 9.0.1 desktop release will occur at tomorrow’s channel meeting (2PM PT)

Beta (10)

• Beta 3 (build 2) to be built today

• Unassigned bugs tracked for the 10 release need to be assigned, or else a justification must be given as to why they no longer need to be tracked
  • Appropriate assignees include module owners, engineering managers, engineers, QA contacts, tech evangelism, etc.

  • Whoever has the next action on a tracked Beta bug should be the current assignee

• Major features being vetted in 10 still, with the option of disabling prior to release
  • Add-ons compatible by default (QA, Product, Release Management, and A-team are all over this starting today.)

  • Add-on hotfix

• Firefox 10 will be our first ESR release
  • Coordination with RelEng is ongoing, EWG meeting tomorrow at 9AM PT should have more details

Aurora (11)

• Three “Tilt” (new Web developer feature) bugs were resolved, hopefully wrapping up Tilt work for 11.

Nightly (12)

• Quentin Headen implemented “Undo ‘Add to dictionary’” (and tests) so you can now say “whoops, didn’t mean to click that” and save yourself from bad additions to your spell-checking dictionary. Thanks Quentin!!

• Jared Wein fixed one of our oldest and ugliest secondary UI bugs with his fix for that crazy floating scrollbar in the Customize Toolbar palette. Thanks, :jaws!
• Steffen Wilberg fixed the offline error page to actually put you back online when you click “try again”. Papercut fixes like this make users happy :-) Thanks Steffen.

Firefox Mobile

• Some recent stability issues are being addressed
  • Fixes land on Nightly first, then move to Aurora
• Fennec Aurora Testday this friday, 1/6! Please join #testday channel

Firefox Sync

• • Java Porting for Sync – in progress.
    • Note to developers: Native Sync behavior is undefined if you have multiple fennecs of any sort on your device.
  • Addon Sync – In firefox 11
    • “”release driver type folk, this may be relevant to your interests”"
  • Replacing existing auth in Sync with BrowserID
    • desired for Mobile World Congress

    • no wiki page, desire, or spec yet (announced yesterday)

Add-on Builder

• Push today @ 2pm

• Goals for 2012 Q1 are finalized and published

Add-on SDK

Release (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

Stabilization (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Released 1.4RC1 last Tuesday

• Have a couple of blockers – will release 1.4RC2
• Still on track to release Next Tuesday, January 10th

Development (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• We have a new proposal for localizing html content in SDK-based add-ons – need your input!

• Still on track to merge to Stabilization branch on January 10th

Feedback Summary

Desktop

9: Same as before, yahoo messenger bug 713014 and lost icons in bookmarks menu bug 713331.

Also: crashes (possibly Firebug related)

8: Spike in users complaining about losing javascript from the address bar, so I think someone linked the sumo thread

Mobile

UX & User Research

UR is kicking off some research to better understand current mobile browser use cases vs use cases for apps. We will conduct a study of real mobile user behavior over one week in February. If you want to learn more and contribute to the study, email Mary Trombley to get an invite to Friday’s kickoff meeting.

UX is working on:

• Australis theme + 80/20/2 UI simplification (shorlander)
  • De-duplication of elements in location bar (jaws)

  • Tab bar cleanup (fryn)
• Multiuser designs (fang)
• Printing improvements (yuan)
• Find-in-page redesign (fang)
• New customization UI (yuan)
• New tab (ttaubert + Boriss)

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Tizen and Mer

• The Tizen Association officially announced its new website and governance structure. Intel is not listed on the website as a sponsor, which prompted some speculation that they had pulled out of the organization, but it appears there is some paperwork underway to make them a member. In related news, some former Meego and Maemo developers updated their website for the Mer Project, an “open, mobile-optimised, core distribution aimed at device manufacturers; powered by Qt/QML and HTML5″ and that is “openly developed, inclusive, and meritocratically governed.”

Opera

• Opera’s newest Labs betas for Windows now offer out-of-process plugins and support for 32-bit plugins running with 64-bit Opera builds. These have been working for some time, but Opera did not want to release them until they were “completely transparent to the user.”

Microsoft

• Microsoft updated their audio implementation of the HTML5 Media Capture specification to include proposed enhancements to include image and video capture.

• The IE team celebrated the decline of IE6 to less than 1% of total online users in the USA with a party and a cake, noting the success of their “IE6 Countdown” campaign.

• A purported leak says that IE11 will be released in Q2 2013 and that IE12 will be released in Q3-Q4 2014.

WebKit

• Initial support for CSS filters landed in WebKit builds. Currently supported features include animation, visual overflow, and hardware acceleration. Rendering of CSS Shaders is also possible in recent builds.

• Other recent improvements include pausing, resuming, and cancelling downloads, hardware-based video decoding on ChromeOS only, support for video subtitles via the <<track>> tag, and more Web Audio API improvements were submitted from Intel. A patch to address the “Noah’s Ark” condition from the HTML5 spec means that WebKit now passes all but one of the html5lib parsing tests.

Google Chrome

• A new proposal for better form autocompletion appeared on the WHATWG wiki, and is supported in Chrome. It proposes an “autocompletetype” attribute for form fields.

• Chrome now also features protection against changes to the default search engine.

Android

• The Android project’s “forked” changes have been almost completely merged back into the Linux kernel mainline.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• There are 700,000 Android devices activated every day

• Inclusion of the Holo theme made a requirement for Android v.4 or later

• Mobile devices moved to the top of the most wanted list this holiday season

• Android devices dominate the top of most searched-for phones in China

• Intel unveiled a prototype for smartphone hardware based of its Medfield chips

• 100 million tablets to be sold worldwide in 2012

• The Nokia Ace, also called the Nokia Lumia 900, rumoured to launch in the US in March

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Can Firefox be a Web browser contender again? Firefox 9.01 Review

• What’s coming in Firefox 11

• Firefox 11 without UAC, favors developers

• Firefox Aurora for Android gets native UI

• Firefox 9: Faster on PCs, all-new on tablets

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2011-12-14

« previous week | index | next week »

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,

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.com/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

Firefox/Planning/2011-12-07

« previous week | index | next week »

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,

• re-enabled updates for all users now that colo is stable again bug 708013

Beta (9)

• FF9.0b5 on track; “go to build” last night, builds handed to QA just now. bug 700906

• FF9.0b6 and signoffs next week

Aurora (10)

• Silent updates
  • Removal of OS security dialog for Windows feature has been deferred to Firefox 11 due to risk.
    • Work should land on M-C this week.

    • Ongoing work to resolve security issues.

Nightly (11)

• Silent updates
  • Background Updates feature has been deferred to Firefox 12 due to risk.
    • Team’s focus is on Removal of OS security dialog for Windows.

    • Risk of delivering too much architectural change for the updater in a single release is too great.

Firefox Mobile

Nightly (11)

• we’ve merged birch to mozilla-central, so development is happening there
  • QA has signed off on the nightly build from mozilla-central

  • RelEng will migrate back nightly users from birch to mozilla-central bug 704549

Beta(8)

• Landed a in-product YouTube player to work around the Kindle Fire not having a system one

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10:
  • Improving Sync Set Up – Went into Aurora. Working with Support and Engagement to update Mozilla pages.
• Firefox 11+:
  • Java Porting for Sync – is in progress

  • Favicon Sync – In development.
  • Addon Sync – In development.
• removing 3.6 addon from amo
  • targeting dec 9th – at risk if outages continue

Add-on Builder

• Release today should complete our Q4 goals

• Published a more detailed high-level roadmap for 2012 with a Q-by-Q breakdown of our major goals and actions: 2012 Roadmap Description w/ Goals & Actions
• Will be meeting with Marketing/PR in the first two weeks of January to develop a plan for launching Builder 1.0 in February

Add-on SDK

Release (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• Add-on SDK released last last Tuesday

• everything running smoothly

Stabilization (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Landed the new Prefs API
  • would love to have people test this – Check out the draft docs for info
• 1.4 Scheduled to ship January 10, 2012

Development (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Localization work still ongoing – New Overview Etherpad

• Development branch scheduled to merge to stabilization January 10, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Platforms

Opera

Opera released version 11.60 of its desktop browser, the first to use Ragnarok, their implementation of the reference HTML5 browser. (The name is a reference to the final world-ending battle between the forces of good and evil in Norse mythology). Opera claims it has a 100% pass rate on a long list of HTML5 rendering tests, and scores 11/11 at html5test.com. Support for a number of <audio> and <video> tags, preload, buffered, seekable, and muted, has also been added. The HTML5 DOM API for Microdata is fully supported, as are the registerProtocolHandler() and registerContentHandler() methods and ECMAScript 5.1. Full support for radial-gradient and repeated-radial-gradient CSS3 properties is also included. In CSS4, support for the image-rendering property is now available with the following values: auto, optimizeSpeed, optimizeQuality, -o-crisp-edges. It also offers speculative parsing, which loads external files while Javascript is executed.

Microsoft

There is increasing speculation that Microsoft may drop the “legacy” Desktop interface from Windows 8 for ARM-based tablets, permitting only Metro-style apps. Such a policy would make it very difficult, if not impossible, for third-party browsers to run on Windows 8 tablets.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-drop-desktop-app-from-windows-8-arm-tablets/11325

Google Chrome

Google’s Paul Irish, .net’s Developer of the Year, gave a good demonstration of Google Chrome’s developer tools at the recent Velocity conference. He covers the Task Manager, Javascript APIs for performance timing and memory information, window.onerror trapping, console.profiles() cpu profiling, console.markTimeLine() for reviewing the page loading process, audits, the heap profiler, and remote debugging via a built-in webserver. It has been added at the Webkit level, and is thus available in all Webkit browsers; it’s already available in the Blackberry Playbook.
http://www.webkitbits.com/post/13796063053/chrome-dev-tools-performance

At the recent EDGE gaming conference, Google developer Paul Kinlan announced that Google Chrome’s upcoming gamepad support will also support cameras and microphones that don’t have to be plugged in. Bloggers are speculating that this will be integrated into Google TV, offering its users the ability to play HTML5 games on their TV with a gamepad.
http://www.favbrowser.com/google-chrome-to-support-gamepads-google-console-on-the-way/

Google Chrome Version 17 was released to Google Chrome’s Dev Channel. The browser now pre-renders Omnibox suggestions if there is high confidence the user will follow the suggestion, and, in Windows, Desktop shortcuts will be created for each user account, to launch Chrome with that account active.

Google announced that on the evening PST of December 8 they will host an event that makes some announcements regarding their Native Client technology. There is a lot of speculation about what will be announced, ranging from an announcement that it will be coming to the Android platform to that Flash will be embedded within it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57332622-264/google-well-prove-native-clients-worth-on-the-web/
https://plus.google.com/111176493330591153076/posts/NGYpgFWFdbA

Webkit

Intel committed changes to the WebKit tree to enable SSE assembly support for two vector math functions that are heavily used in Web Audio.
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73182

Code supporting W3C notifications landed in WebKit nightlies for Safari.
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebNotifications/publish/
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73253

Other committed trunk changes this week include a number of bugfixes and improved cursor caching for IndexedDb.

Some hackers put together an interesting demonstration of WebGL on the iPad by creating a gesture browser. See the video at http://vimeo.com/31644717

WebM

The WebM project released some short animated videos describing what video codecs are and what WebM is all about.
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/11/video-codecs-101.html

Mobile

Summary below, full update here

• Android platform distribution: v2.3 at 50%, v2.2 at 35% and v2.1 at 10%

• The web version of the Android Market has been updated with handset model and app version for reviews

• Opera Mini will be included in MediaTek’s runtime environment for “smart feature phones”.

• Opera joined an initiative coordinated by the European Commission to make the Internet safer for kids by focusing on age-appropriate privacy settings, wider use of content classification and parental control,

• Dolphin Browser HD v 7.2 launched and gained a new add-on, called the Dolphin Companion

• Class-action lawsuits in the US and further smartphone security analysis have emerged following the discovery of the Carrier IQ app on smartphones

• Verizon will not integrate Google Wallet into the Galaxy Nexus, in favour of competitor mobile payments platform Isis

• Flexible screens on mobile phones might be pioneered next year by Samsung

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• How to remove ads in a Web page before printing in Firefox

• OS X 10.5 Leopard may lose Firefox in 2012

• Mozilla ponders demise of Firefox for Apple’s Leopard

• Mozilla Firefox turning its attention to gaming with gamepad support?

• You Can Now Use Game Controllers with Firefox
• Mozilla introduces gamepad support to Firefox
• Google to douse Firefox for good?

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2011-11-30

« previous week | index | next week »

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,

Beta (9)

Aurora (10)

• Silent update
  • Finishing work for Removal of OS security dialog for Windows. Expect to be ready to land early next week.

  • Finishing work for Add-ons default to compatible. Few outstanding bugs.

Nightly (11)

• Silent update
  • Background updates on hold until completion of Removal of OS security dialog for Windows.
• m_kato fixed and landed the first half of Chrome Profile Migration (Cookies, History, Bookmarks)

Firefox Mobile

• NativeUI for Android now on http://nightly.mozilla.org, file bugs under Fennec | Native in bugzilla, fixes startup and page loading performance issues as well as Flash. Join the test drivers program: https://www.mozilla.com/mobile/testdrivers

• SUMO Day is tomorrow, see http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2011/11/28/sumo-day-december-1st/ or just go read some SUMO forum posts now, DIY user feedback
• Talk to Firefox for Android NativeUI users in person next Weds. evening in SF, http://www.meetup.com/Firefox-Android-superheroes/

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10:
  • Improving Sync Set Up – Went into Aurora. Working with Support and Engagement to update Mozilla pages.
• Firefox 11+:
  • Java Porting for Sync – is in progress

  • Favicon Sync – In development.
  • Addon Sync – In development.
• removing 3.6 addon from amo
  • targeting dec 9th

Add-on Builder

• No release this week, change set has a few unresolved bugs

• Q4 goals are on-track
• Socialized plans for Builder appification in 2012 w/ Kevin Dangoor. I’ll be incorporating his feedback in a more detailed roadmap/product plan by week’s end.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• Add-on SDK 1.3 released yesterday!
  • 1.3 Release Notes
• Jorge Villalobos ran performance tests on the SDK and Fx Beta
  • empty add-on only added 11ms to start up

  • random, complicated add-on added 22ms to start-up
  • working on a system to run perf tests on the jetpack project tree bug 702684

Stabilization (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Development branch merged to Stabilization yesterday

• Even more performance improvements!
  • we landed a brand new, simplified, loader

  • we simplified the XPI layout bug 660629
  • we will measure these new additions to look for more performance gains
• 1.4 scheduled to ship on January 10, 2012

Development (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Still ongoing discussions about l10n – bug 691782 and in etherpad

• Development branch scheduled to merge to stabilization on January 10, 2012

Feedback Summary

Desktop

• Something about the holidays spurs people to have malware :( The following are taking over people’s searches. All of these were around before but they’ve moved up in the complaint ranking.
  • Bigseekpro

  • Babylon search
  • Bearshare websearch
  • Searchqu
• Outlook WebAccess bug 703015
• Java doesn’t work (no necessarily Java Console): bug 704741
• Complaints about Google’s pushout of Google+
• Bookmark icon loss (as before)

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Web Technology

Google Chrome

ANGLE now has full OpenGL support for windows

Google’s ANGLE library for supporting OpenGL on Windows now passes the GL ES 2.0 implementation. ANGLE translates OpenGL calls into their Direct3D 9 equivalents, allowing Chrome to use a single open graphics standard across all platforms.
more

Chrome beta now syncs entire profiles for shared computers

Google added a new feature that lets people who use a shared computer each have their own personalized Chrome, and lets them each sign in to Chrome to sync their information.
more

Google Chrome beta has Quota Management for local storage

The latest version of Chrome browser has the first concept and its implementation of Quota Management API . It handles quota for AppCache, IndexedDB, WebSQL and File System API.
more

WebKit/Chrome

1,079 changes landed in the WebKit and Chromium repositories. Notifications were added for screen wake-ups and unlocks, and CSS Transforms now partially work on SVG elements. The Gamepad API also landed. A low-entropy, shared secret authentication protocol called P244 was added to Chromium. The ability to create desktop shortcuts for Chrome Profiles has been implemented for Windows.

Ad inside Chrome browser itself

Users of Google Chrome noticed an in-browser ad for Chromebooks, likely the first time that Google had used the browser itself to deliver advertising.
more

Microsoft

IE9

IE9 made PCWorld’s 100 best products of 2011, Internet Explorer 9 comes in at #19, the only major browser to make the list this go around.
more

IE10

Microsoft released the 4th preview edition of IE10 which can be tested on Windows 8. It adds support for Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), blobBuilder from the File:Api:Writer specification, and the user-select property in CSS. It also improves quirks mode to make it more consistent with those in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.his updated quirks mode supports quirks for page layout, while allowing use of more up-to-date standards features like HTML5 elements for audio, video, canvas, and more.
more

Opera

The latest snapshot of Opera 12 now supports CORS, and their Dragonfly web development tool now has Style Profiling which provides a performance profile of the entire process of building a web page, allowing web developers to optimize their style selectors.
http://my.opera.com/dragonfly/blog/style-profiler-preview

Avant

Avant said they would release a new browser in early 2012 that had support for the WebKit, Gecko, IE7 and IE9 rendering engines.
http://www.favbrowser.com/avant-browser-to-use-4-rendering-engines/

Development tools: QualityBots

Google released Qualitybots, a tool that allows users to create batch webpage comparisons across Chrome channels by utilizing EC2 machines. The resulting comparisons will help webpage designers and Chrome app developers understand how their work will fare in future Chrome versions.

Java

Microsoft said that hackers are launching millions of attacks on Java installations, and that, sadly, 60% of Java installations lacked an 18-month-old Java security update.
more

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Amazon answered to Congress on privacy in the Silk browser

• Security and privacy constitute a rising concern on mobile

• Panasonic to enter European and North American markets with Android-based smartphones

• Yandex to be the default search engine in Windows Phone 7 devices in Russia

• Windows Phone 7 devices to launch in China in 2012

• Samsung’s Cortex-A15 chips have been unveiled, to come to devices in Q2 next year

• Telefonica started testing a mobile payment and ID card system based on NFC technology

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Mozilla’s WebAPI for Firefox takes shape, porn sites quiver in anticipation

• Firefox’s Android reboot begins tomorrow
• Firefox for Android Will Get Its New Interface Tonight
• Chrome and Firefox Extensions That Protect You from Yourself

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

Firefox/Planning/2011-11-23

« previous week | index | next week »

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

<script>if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = “show”; var tocHideText = “hide”; showTocToggle(); } </script>

Actions from Last Week

• Christian and Laura to figure out where to blog about Add-ons compatible by default (to get more testers enabling the feature once it is on Aurora)

• blassey to report back on disabling flash on Aurora (XUL) Fennec
  • pushed the patches (bug 704612 and bug 703815)
• Christian to add explanation of new permissions requests to mobile beta release notes (bug 702183)

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6,

• 8.0.1 released Monday (11/21)
  • Post-Mortem scheduled for next Friday (12/2) at 10AM PT in Warp Core
• Triage meetings being held for 3.6.25 security bugs

Beta (9)

• To be the first FF mobile release posted to the Amazon Appstore

Aurora (10)

• Silent Update
  • Removal of OS security dialog for Windows close to complete. Working with releng on final issue. Details on Brian’s blog.

  • Add-ons default to compatible has landed on Nightly and Aurora. Currently prefed off on Aurora. Ready for testing. Details on Blair’s blog.
  • Your help is needed to test these features. Read the blog posts or speak with Brian, Ehsan, Blair, Anthony or me if you have any questions.

Nightly (11)

• Silent Update
  • Background updates ready for review and testing. Details on Ehsan’s blog.
    • Note that this feature, which had been thought to be ready in 10 will now land in 11.

• Project Snappy kicked off last week
  • Aim is to improve Firefox responsiveness.

  • Get in touch with Taras or Lawrence if you’re interested in contributing.

• Style Editor has landed. bug 583041

• Catch process hangs landed this morning. More at bug 429592

Firefox Mobile

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 10:
  • Improving Sync Set Up – Went into Aurora. Working with Support and Engagement to update Mozilla pages.
• Firefox 11+:
  • Java Porting for Sync – is in progress

  • Push to Device – In development. You can play with an add-on here.
  • Addon Sync – In development.

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Release (1.2 -> Firefox 7,

• Everything A-OK

Stabilization (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• Still on 1.3RC1 which was spun last week.

• Will stick with RC1 for release next week unless any blockers appear
• 1.3 Release on track for Tues. Nov. 29th!

Development (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Ongoing discussion and proposals for l10n support in Add-on SDK [bug 691782]

• New proposal about changes to the way we handle version strings inside the Add-on SDK [Discussion]
• Still on-track to merge to stabilization branch on Nov. 29th

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Cheng is on a plane somewhere over the North Pacific so read the wiki.

Top Firefox 8 issues

• Missing favicons

• No Java. bug 704741
• Outlook web access attachments don’t work bug 703015
• Problems getting the latest Flash player to work [1] — may be either related to 64-bit-ness or Flash installing in an unexpected location. This also presents as Youtube not working:[2] and [3]
• Adblock plus broke Gmail chat [4] — this may be fixed since reports have tapered.

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Amazon

• Sencha conducted an in-depth of the Amazon Fire’s browser, Silk, for HTML5 support and overall performance. It performed below its peers on standardized tests like Acid3 and Sunspider. CSS animations were jerky, and that support for 3D transforms, web sockets, web workers, and many HTML form types are also absent. They also found that the “cloud-accelerated” Silk browser had little performance difference whether the acceleration was on or off. http://www.sencha.com/blog/html5-scorecard-amazon-kindle-fire/

• A Citigroup investment research report was released that claimed that their research with hardware vendors indicated that Amazon was going to release a smartphone in 2012, manufactured with Foxconn.

Webkit / Google Chrome

• Google’s V8 engine released an updated incremental garbage collector, which “dramatically improves interactive performance of web apps and HTML5 games”. Google also released a Javascript stress test for the engine. http://goo.gl/QWugU.

• Google updated their demo implementation of their proposed JPEG replacement, WebP. It now features lossless compression and alpha channel transparency. http://blog.chromium.org/2011/11/lossless-and-transparency-encoding-in.html

• Here’s a summary article at CNET about WebP and Microsoft’s similar JPEG XR proposal: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57329328-264/googles-webp-crosshairs-target-png-not-just-jpeg/?tag=mncol;1n

• Chromium and Webkit had the “busiest week ever”, with 1,745 changes. The new Chromium history UI was launched, the Web Inspector now provides more information about object definitions and styles, and support for CSS4 Images cross-fade() function was added to the tree. The CSS3 Flexible Box implementation has been enabled by default, and some initial patches for CSS Grid Layout landed. Support for <meta name=”referrer”> allows page authors to specify referrer policy, making it easier to anonymize later web requests. Most CSS Filters now work correctly in nightlies, and computed styles for CSS Shaders have been implemented as well. This week Web Intents is expected to land.

Microsoft

• Microsoft released reference implementations of their proposed changes to ECMAScript. Suggested changes include math functions such as cosh, sinh, tanh, log2, log10; string methods like startsWith, endsWith, and contains, and number methods such as isFinite and isInteger. “When running on Windows 7, the prototype implementation supports 363 available Locales, 18 numbering systems, many date patterns, and includes support for the Gregorian, Islamic, Hebrew, Buddhist, Korean, and Japanese calendars.” http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/11/22/evolving-ecmascript.aspx

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Firefox for Android Gets Its Overhaul

• Firefox’s Android reboot begins tomorrow
• Firefox for Android Will Get Its New Interface Tonight

• Mozilla makes progress on Firefox silent updates

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week