Platform/2015-03-25

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Need To Know

(Release and system issues that may impact engineering this week.)

Notices/Schedule (lsblakk/sylvestre/lmandel)

We shipped two chemspills over the weekend: Firefox 36.0.3 and 36.0.4 (plus Firefox ESR 31.5.2 and 31.5.3)

Firefox 37 is scheduled to be released on March 31. That's next week! For Firefox 37 Beta/Release, please report any keyboard related issues on OS X such as the keyboard stopping to work and requiring a browser restart.

MemShrink (njn)

jemalloc3 has been disabled again on trunk due to Windows crashes. The heap allocator is a fundamental thing and changing it in a complex program like a browser is hard.

Thanks to Jim Blandy, jemalloc (the old version currently used in Firefox releases, not jemalloc3) is now used as the allocator for the JavaScript shell, instead of the system allocator (bug 1134039). This makes the shell configuration closer to the browser configuration, which will make arewefastyet.com results more representative. But we don't yet have data on whether those results have changed significantly due to some OS X problems (bug 1146267). It's worth repeating: changing the heap allocator is hard.

about:memory now has a "resident-peak" measurement (bug 1145007) on Unix (Linux, OSX, *BSD), which measures peak physical memory usage for the process. It may be useful for detecting short-lived spikes in memory usage.

The new Reader View feature was causing high memory usage on desktop Nightly, but has now been fixed in bug 1139678.

Team Stand-ups

Media (mreavy)

In Firefox 37, the Media team is shipping MSE (Media Source Extensions, bug 778617) to improve YouTube's HTML5 video playback on Windows. YouTube will now default to HTML5 video instead of Flash on Windows. MSE for OS X is being tested in Aurora 38. Please watch YouTube loading or buffering problems or high memory usage on Windows or OS X!

Shumway (tschneidereit)

The Shumway team continues to focus on improving startup performance and Flash ad rendering.