ChannelSwitching/2011-03-16

Attendees

• Rob Sayre, Laura Mesa, Chris Blizzard, Mayumi Matsuno, Sheila Mooney, Alexander Limi

Status

• Bug 386760 - close to review, making progress.
• Need someone on the UI work for the channel updater.
• Taras will jump in and help with this project if required.
• UI work pretty easy. Limi will own and discuss with team this week (UI work week).
• Getting the UI piece done is pretty critical since it blocks us.

Questions and Discussion

• Mobile schedule
  • Plan is for them to follow our cycle.

• Versions
  • We would like to drop the number.
  • Press likes to use a number but we will refer to it as Firefox not version number.
  • This will impact in product messaging and what we do there.
  • Are we free to 'un geek version numbers"? Can we display something else?
  • Yes - Internally we can change this but externally we can use something more user friendly. Miyumi, Limi will figure this out.
  • How do you handle numbers in channel. Do we leave in the version numbers 8-experimental?
  • Could be on versions of release channel could be 6 and experimental channel could be 8? Yes.

• Ad Ons
  • Still big questions there.
  • Probably ok for the first cycle but the next cycle might be harder.
  • Haven't pushed Jetpack. The top add ons can't really move over to Jetpack due to complexity.
  • We will break the binary add ons (link to FF) - need to decide what to do.
  • Should we talk to eng and add on developers? Find out what would be helpful for them and hold tech session to talk through compatibility issues.
  • Most people don't update add ons until users complain.
  • Complaints will come in increments as code moves through the channel - hopefully by the time we get to the release they will update.
• Support for Previous Versions
  • Plan - keep 3.6 and end of life it in a year (proposal)
  • Need to continue to support platforms that aren't supported in 4.0.
  • 3.5 will go away after 4.0. People will need to migrate to new world via automatic update.
  • Let people turn off automatic updates if they want.

• Evangelizing Channels
  • Need to write value propositions for each channel and get that out in front of users (experimental, beta, release).
  • How are we going to support all channels - emails, blog, newsletters. Take an opportunity with the launch announcement to get out to people ie: facebook users - point them to the right channel.
  • We can have blogs you can subscribe to for each channel.
  • We can use the home page for communications - space for input, blog posts,. Good for experimental channel but not necessarily other ones.
• Other topics
  • The go/no go decisions...probably always a go with security patches and something minimal.
  • Security updates will go via the release route unless some exception - ie: 0 day.
  • Users currently don't do a good job of separating stuff out into different profiles. You want to do weird stuff - it's separate, you don't use your default profile. Some process to do this.
  • Need to set up a meeting with PR - how they are going to message stuff landing on various channels, stages.
• Labs Projects
  • Labs can do what they want. If we want to get a labs project in a channel, set expectations that it won't follow through all channels.
  • Labs wants to build their group of users.
  • Labs version of FF - with all the add ons they are working on - is this a new channel? Who is working on this?
  • Probably looks more like mobile. It's it's own channel but not able to switch to it from the UI.
• Other Projects
  • How is test pilot going to integrate? Rob - doesn't know their plans. Rob - will be doing more telemetry in general - need to decide was balance of privacy/telemetry is appropriate for each channel.
  • We can use test pilot to advertize new features.
  • Bugzilla changes - need to make some changes here. Logging bugs for different channels - Rob has next actions on this.
  • Socorro - changes to display channels - changes to views, admin screens - Sheila tracking this.
  • Metrics - changes? Probably not too many - need the right ADU numbers.
  • Localization - nightly tracking in US only. 90% of locales covered by the time we get to beta. Small ones can trail after beta and if they aren't ready we can ship english strings.
  • Sumo? Will they only support latest? Limi will be talking to them later today - find out what they are planning.

Next Actions

• Discussion on add ons - afternoon 2011-03-16
• UI work - Limi
• Rob Strong - finish off work for bug 386760
• Bugzilla changes - Rob will track this.
• Socorro UI changes - Sheila tracking this.
• Sumo meeting - Limi tracking this.