Firefox/Planning/2012-11-14

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Finch 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# 99696 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 99696 (US)
• Vidyo Room: ProductCoordination
• 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

Services

Firefox Sync

No news.

Product Announcements

Is in 18, disabled. One outstanding bug just reported (bug 810988). Awaiting hardware and server-side deployment before testing and enabling.

Firefox Health Report

We're in the process of preparing the initial landing of Firefox Health Report for later this week. This will include collection of a minimal set of measurements (mainly basic app info like which product this is), UI for opting out of collection/submission, and submission of those measurements in a privacy-aware way to our metrics infrastructure for analysis.

You can read Mitchell's thoughts on the importance of this effort here:

https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/09/21/firefox-health-report/

and Gilbert's here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2012/09/21/firefox-health-report/

This feature has had code review (of course), privacy review, and has gone all the way up to the top and back down again.

• Meta bug: bug 718066
• Privacy review: bug 799552
• Data providers: bug 808109

Questions? Let rnewman be your point of contact (though gps should be the recipient of beer and applause). For press inquiries, I bet the Press Team is the right target: press@mozilla.com.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.11 -> Firefox 16, 17)

Stabilization (1.12 -> Firefox 17, 18)

Development (1.13 -> Firefox 18, 19)

Market insights from the Product Marketing Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

Google

• Google's Chrome Web Store made it a bit more difficult for NPAPI plugin vendors to get visibility, and encourages them to port plugins to Google's Native Client
• Chrome Packaged Apps now support direct TCP or UDP network connections.
• MathML, Datalist support for time and date, and CSS custom filters are now supported in recent Chrome beta builds. A number of HTML5 APIs were unprefixed in this release as well.
• Chrome on Windows now supports GPU-accelerated video decoding for Chrome on Windows, which Google describes as significantly improving battery life on notebooks.
• Google highlighted Chrome's Octane scores over the last year, which show that their browser's Javascript speed has improved 26% in that time.
• Adobe Flash in Chrome on Mac OS X now runs in a sandbox "which is much more robust than anything else available"
• Very soon, Google Chrome users will be able access the Chrome Start menu from the Windows task bar
• Do Not Track support was added to Chrome 23

HTML5

• In a recent survey, 94% of mobile app developers plan to deploy HTML5 mobile applications

Microsoft

• IE10 is now available as a "release preview" for Windows 7. It's also becoming clear that Microsoft has been working with major websites to help them take advantage of some IE10-only features, including swipe navigation. The browser's lack of support for WebGL and relatively poorer Javascript performance has game developers unhappy, however.
• Microsoft published some studies saying that "IE10 and IE9 now have the fastest browser response times on Windows, with IE10 showing a noticeable increase over IE9". Recent RoboHornet tests also found that IE10 ran 37% faster than Google Chrome on the same hardware. The browser also supports a number of -webkit- prefixed CSS properties, all of which are linked in the blog post.
• Internet Explorer has 75% market share in Korea thanks to a government-mandated encryption requirement. That requirement is now an election issue in the country.

Mobile Telephony

• For the first time ever, the number of text messages sent via mobile phones fell in the last quarter. The decline can be attributed to "over the top" messaging services from Apple, Facebook, Google, and others.

Opera

• Opera 12.10 was released, and now offers integration with the Mac OS X Mountain Lion Notification Center and built-in sharing of pages with Facebook and Twitter. Inertia scrolling and pinch-to-zoom is also now available on Windows 7 and Windows 8.
• Opera now supports prefetching DNS lookups when the user hovers over a link.

Security

• Kaspersky looked at a sample of 10 million machines and foound that only 77% of them had the latest version of the browser. Firefox users were the most likely to have an outdated browser.

WebKit

• WebKit authors are working diligently on improving RoboHornet benchmark performance

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• Samsung sold 56 million units in Q3, Apple 27 million, Huawei 16 million and Sony 8.8 million
• increasing penetration of computer manufacturers in the mobile device market and the increasing influence of Asia-based OEMs in the top tiers of the industry
• Nokia launched HERE, location-based services aimed at horizontal deployment across platforms
• Android increased its distance from Apple in Q3 as measured by shipments
• Gingerbread at 54% of the market, Ice Cream Sandwich at 26%, Froyo at 12%, Eclair at 3%, Jelly Bean at 2.7% and Honeycomb at 2%
• Africa, the second-biggest mobile region by subscribers, is one of the most engaged ones