Firefox2/StatusMeetings/2006-02-07

In Attendance

phone: mpilgrim, axel, bsmedberg room: schrep, cbeard, timr, rebron, rob_strong, jesse, dietrich, timr, davel, beng, darin, bryner, annie, brettw, linus, maria, beltzner, mconnor, pgreen, jhughes

Status Updates

Places

• organized bugs into four categories:
  • a1/dogfood
  • a2/feature complete
  • b1/feature frozen
  • b2/future
  • these are target milestones
• still working through performance problems and not-working things
• not sure if things will be ready for current A1 target
  • want to ensure that there's no dataloss or instability problems before a1
  • hoping to be ready no later than 2 weeks from now
  • might want to cut alpha1 without --enable-places
• davel: be sure to include pointers to test plans and tools and hooks
• changes are being checked into trunk and 1_8_BRANCH at the same time

Tabbed Browsing

• close-buttons-on-tabs currently on trunk (ready for A1)
• undoCloseTab hacked up solution in place, need to figure out UI
• still working on tab overflow solutions, focusing on making it feel right
  • solution in progress seems to be to use [<<] / [>>] buttons at each end
• won't be ready for current A1 target

Extension Manager Enhancements

• working on blacklisting, extension dependencies and support for locale packs, all of which are intertwined
  • on track to hit A1 target
• some of the UI designs required a browser-notification system which isn't going to hit, so we'll need to revisit the UI
• plans in place to change the extension manager UI, but haven't started work on that yet

Installer

• w32 only, moving to nSysInstaller (nullSoft/OSS), saves us 130K on the installer size, gets rid of our previous solution which was pretty messy
• pretty much ready to go, just need to merge to tree
• mpilgim: there's an existing bug on file for supporting installers in high contrast themes, be sure to test your new solution on that, too.
• axel: what's the impact for l10n repackaging?
  • when it lands, it will be no different than our current solution for repackaging
• bsmedberg: we can still land this in an installer2 directory for now
• should be ready for A2
• need to create a single tracking bug
• axel: what's the license
  • mpilgrim: seems to be ZLIB

Search Engine UI

• gavin sharp is pursuing this, will be granted ownership
• ben has asked him to triage the bugs and set target milestones
• starting from the prototype from last year
• not ready for current A1 target date
• axel: are we changing the format for the searchplugins for 2.0?
  • ben: yes, to an XML format that is similar but not necessarily identical to OpenSearch
  • mconnor: and we'll provide a converter so that we can parse and convert existing sherlock-formatted plugins
  • jesse: why not the same format as Microsoft?
  • cbeard: OpenSearch 1.1 isn't actually open, it's available for other people to use, but it's controlled by Amazon. So we aim to be compatible and extensible with any other emerging standards.
  • ben: the implementation will be similar to OpenSearch, but the namespace might be different to allow us to extend it as required. We're leaving ourselves open to wherever this ecosystem moves.
• cbeard: will we have support for rich-AJAXy-find as you type stuff?
  • ben: should be easy to add on to the format we're planning, but not currently scoped during development

Visual Refresh

• not ready for current A1 target
• looking at a quick RFP/contest solution to find a superstar in waiting who wants to help us here
• need an offline session with cbeard, beltzner, schrep and ben to build requirements for the "new look" of Firefox
• ben: should probably ping SilverOrange about this, Steve is interested
• cbeard to kick this off

Platform Uplift

• neither brendan nor jst are at this meeting
• darin: a lot of patches are trickling over already due to the current branch landing strategy
• schrep: goal is to control which ones will make it into 1.8.1 to be both proactive and reactive for quality.
• darin: sounds urgent, since we've been allowing checkins for the past two weeks
• schrep: by next status meeting, I'll have a better heads up

Inline Spell Check

• mostly works on trunk, no work has been done to port to branch
• main thing to figure out is how to distribute the dictionary
  • a size issue (200kb compressed)
  • bsmedberg: extension locales buys us 70 more KB
  • rob_strong: I bought you the other 130KB with the installer!
  • axel: we have a licensing issue with any localized dictionary, L10n:Dictionaries to track them
• would be nice to see a plan for including it and moving it to the branch
• ben: there's a lot of dependency on the extension locale stuff that needs to be resolved before we move this to branch

Instrumentation / Exit Surveys

• exit surveys in uninstaller can be in 1.5.0.2, actually
• exit surveys can be localized, but our uninstaller is en-US only atm
• can start offering the exit survey to en-US for A1 as well
• some design on instrumentation on the wiki

Session Saver

• not started
• dietrich and mconnor starting in on implementation
• annie: I have some notes from when I looked at things that go on a wiki page
• dietrich: I'll set up a wiki page!
• dveditz: why not just reuse session saver?
  • code is pretty bad, although its feature set is interesting

Branding & Update Systems

• this is distribution support stuff
• how we do client channel support, eula, repackages
• per channel configuration, etc
• schrep: this one goes into rob_strong's bucket

RSS

• robert sayre is working on a generic feed parsing service that will be available at the platform level
• mpilgrim: I wrote one in python, if that helps; I think that robert is basically converting mine see bug 325080. Keeping an eye on this is on my list of things to do
• ben: I tried a prototype to show "not-xml" in the content area, and it sort of worked, in that you saw the content and the source was visible in the view-source. Some problems around pages being served in the wrong type, and we might be able to get around that with content sniffing.
• darin: content-sniffing should be easier to do on trunk than on branch
• after that 3 or 4 weeks of UI work on top of these underlying pieces
• ben: I've been doing a minimum-work UI approach
• cbeard: any thought towards feed previews?
• ben: it should be simple to do; potentially in scope, but we need to be cautious of apple's patents in this area
• davel: content-sniffing will likely require some regression testing
  • darin: that should be possible and fairly easy to do
• axel: what about our approach of transforming the document using a stylesheet?
  • ben: the viewer needs some chrome privs, so this might not be feasible, although it's a good idea!

Status Indication UI

• not going to make Firefox 2

Offline mode / better use of cache

• set of low hanging fruit that's doable for Firefox2
  • code is overly cautious
  • we don't take advantage of the cache information we have now
  • when user changes networks to one that requires proxy-autoconfig, the browser should try reloading the pack file before ditching
• higher level issues like detection and rich offline use won't make it

Pluggable Download Manager

• not going to make Firefox 2

Anti-Phishing

• cbeard: taking ownership and moving to higher priority

Schedule Revisit

• A1 seems awfully unexciting at the moment
• certainly seems like it won't be good for public feedback as we had hoped
• ben: I think Places can get to a1 status in two weeks
• davel: I've got a group of 8-10 undergrads in Florida who would be willing to pound on things from a QA perspective
• overhead for A1 release would be small, probably just post nightly builds
  • might want to push them to the beta channel, but need to be careful there
  • major releases take 3-4 days for smoketesting
• A1 needs to have dogfood level of places and tabbed browsing
• ben: are there similar gecko milestone dates that we can sync to?
  • schrep: there should be, definitely, will look at that
• looking at a global schedule slip of 2 weeks
• feel that the other milestone separations are reasonable
• smedberg: when would we diverge for 1_8_1_BRANCH?
  • schrep: we'd be targeting that for beta

Other Business

• decided to use dev-apps-firefox as the newsgroup/mailing list for discussion of Firefox development issues
• davel: we need a better communication mechanism between business development, marketing and engineering
• axel: trying to write a XULRunner application that does automatic trademark checks on the source side, so hopefully we'll have less trouble with that this time around

New Items to Consider

• polish bugs
• update system bugs discovered in the 1.5 --> 1.5.0.1 update

Action Items

• coming soon