Firefox/Planning/2011-12-07

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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

REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren't able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

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 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

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