Firefox3/StatusMeetings/2006-08-16

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Meeting Details

• 11:00am PDT (18:00 UTC)
• Mozilla HQ, 1st floor conference table
• +1 866 216 2181 (or +1 303 228 0514)
• join irc.mozilla.org #granparadiso for backchannel

Agenda

• Gecko 1.9 Roundtable
• Firefox 3
• Any other business

Gecko 1.9 Roundtable

• Jonas to talk XBL2 next week
• What happens to Gecko after 1.9? When do we want Gecko 1.0/Gecko++/GeckoNX

• bsmedberg working on Linux reference build platform + VM for Gecko1.9/Fx3
  • reference compiler will be reasonably new (gcc 4.2ish), and using gcc 4.2 features will sometimes cause performance regressions with older gcc (mainly Ts)
  • new build VMs

• need to drop remaining old tinderboxes
  • VC6 (creature, thunderbird, sunbird, etc.)

• performance tinderboxes
  • need numbers for specific releases + some intermediate steps (e.g. milestones + some nightlies if available)
  • need historical numbers before we can toss out btek

• Check into Cocoa native theme + Cocoa form widgets situation (forms.css issues, needs reviews)

Firefox 3

beltzner's thoughts on planning out fx3
Firefox 3 should solve real user problems. My first pass at some of the problems users are having right now:

• not able to act on the metadata available to them (microformats, recognition of rich content types, etc)
• the browser doesn't learn from their behaviour, doesn't react to their browsing choices
• often barraged with alerts, popups, warnings, etc.
• not understanding when they are at risk online
• managing downloaded files and saving rich online media content is painful; things like saving flash movies and getting back to them later should be easier
• can be hard to interact with web based apps (back/forward)
• hard to manage several concurrent task streams
• add-ons, plugins, services are hard to install and manage

These correlate pretty well with a few of the themes that we're looking to collect data on. Based on the problems that are listed above, I'd think the ones we want to get some solid data on are:

• Microformat Detection
• Give users control over data gathered while browsing
• Make a user's Web experiences safer and more secure
• Enhance support for 3rd Party Service Providers
• Make it easier for users to customize and control their experiences on the Web

In terms of Gecko 1.9 requirements, this boils down to:

• microformat detection
• full text indexing, easy ability to harvest data from pages and annotate history with it
• add-on capability additions (locale packs, plugins, searchplugins, services as add-ons)
• cairofication of XUL to get us nicer notification capabilities
• allow web services to act as content handlers

Next I'm going to go through the polish lists and come up with some long-known usability deficiencies that we probably want to target:

• download manager
• XPI install