Compatibility/Mobile/2013-09-09

• Mobile Web Compatibility Meeting - 2013-09-09
• Minutes: Previous 2013-08-26

Meeting: Mobile Web Compatibility Weekly
Agenda: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/webcompat
Chair: Karl Dubost
Scribe: Mike Taylor
Regrets: 

Topic: previous meeting, next meeting

• Next meeting: The next meeting will be on September 16, 2013

Topic: Success Criteria (lmandel)

Status of the discussion on how do we define our achievements of success.

• karl: I've had a discussion with lmandel this morning on this topic. does anyone else have any points to add to the discussion.
• lmandel: I'll frame this again. The idea is that we come back in six months and are able to answer the question, "Is this worth the effort? Have we been successful?" If we're going to come back and evaluate these things, it would be good to define in advance what the metrics are rather than be caught offguard. How do we actually measure what we're doing here and that's it's important and effective. one of the key ones was establishing key contacts at important sites, key members of communities that will help us do outreach. We talked about the perils about going after a specific number in relation to top N sites. It's out of our control in many of the cases.
• mike: I feel like I need to refresh my brain re-reading through the thread on the mailing list.
• karl: please do, challenge those ideas. there are things we may have missed or gotten wrong.
• lmandel: that's completely right, we're just bouncing ideas around at this moment. if i asked you to list what you've achieved by december to be successful, how would you define that?

[action item] everyone, think about this. contribute ideas.

Topic: Videos work (hallvord)

Summary of videos testing progress. http://mzl.la/17krW53

• m3u playlist bug on Android bug 780379
• hallvord: I went through pretty much all the open bugs. A lot of them were just about missing h264 support and were easily closed. Some others just about sniffing. There's another set about m3u support, which is a Safari extension. Since we don't support that we're failing.
• lmandel: There's a bug for Android, that's the same for FFOS, right?
• hallvord: I'm not quite sure how I should follow up on this.
• lmandel: For that one, since it's not in the spec and an Apple extensiondoes Google support that?
• hallvord: I'm not sure, I haven't written any tests for it yet. Just observations.
• blassey: do we have a bug?
• lmandel: I've added a needsinfo for you, 780379.
• blassey: I'll talk to ??? and follow up.
• hallvord: Some sites have only apps for non-Flash browsers, ex 888733
• lmandel: any site where they don't support web playback, we shouldn't push too much for it (regarding Flash-only video players). have you identified any additional frameworks?
• hallvord: no, I haven't seen any other. Just Brightcove + videojs that we already know about.
• lmandel: I've had a request to identify what are the big video frameworks, but haven't had good answers yet.
  • dailymotion
  • Youtube
  • vimeo
  • https://etherpad.mozilla.org/videohostingsites
• hallvord: it might be interesting to do some spidering and analysis of common scripts/etc. to see if some data falls out.

[action] TODO-20130909-01 Hallvord to do analysis on list of video sites from lmandel. [action] TODO-20130909-02 lmandel to send list of video sites to hallvors

• hallvord: follow up question: Is it OK if I don't follow up on video performance questions? My general impression was that there is work to be done.
• lmandel: It would be good to come up with a list of feedback and give that back to our team. Who's the right person?
• blassey: gcp are the initials.

[action] hallvord to follow up with gcp about performance issues.

Topic: Fixing UA detection frameworks/libraries (miketaylr)

There is a list being gathered by mike and others that will need to be tested and fixed eventually. Initial collection is done and testing is in progress. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/UADetectionLibraries

* WPTouch: probably need to write a blog post on how to fix this locally
* detectmobilebrowsers.com: question about Tablet UA

* How should we work with device ids? Thinking specifically about WURFL

• miketaylr: there is a list on the wiki now. The etherpad is out of date. Combination of

opensource stuff and commercial libs. I made a call depending on how popular the libs were. I started the analysis. I'm about 25% of the list. So far we do pretty well. As long we are identified as mobile, I'm happy with that. I have opened a bug each time there was an issue. WPTouch seems a big issue. The first tweet was not yet successful. We need to have a discussion. We might want to write a blog post on how to hack it locally. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=909420

• lmandel: that seems a good idea to write a blog post if there are any issues with

bizdev team of WPTouch.

• miketaylr: I initiated the contact with a tweet and then followed up with emails.
• vishy: we have relationships with WURFL. What about the big picture?
• miketaylr: The process is still to be developed. I'm happy to work with big framework.
• lmandel: Mike will be the Point of COntact for these companies with regards to the UA

detection libraries.

• vishy: I will work with Mike about WPTouch.
• lmandel: How should we work with device ID which might be added to UA strings in the future? We need to make sure that the detection is generic enough and/or know how we deal with changing UA strings.

blassey and lmandel having different type of information for UA strings. Need to be clarified.

• lmandel: this is a question we need to answer, do we share device id information with device identification frameworks and when do we do that?

Topic: Other verticals to investigate after UA and Video (lmandel)

What other vertical ways are there to slice Web compatibility?

• blogging tools / editing?
• lmandel: what are other verticals we should go after?
• karlcow: for example, blogging platforms. medium, square, etc. more on the publishing side, is it working? everything which helps you to post things on the web (instagram).
• lmandel: the blogging one is a good suggestion.
• karlcow: this will be very important once we're on a tablet.
• hallvord: it's a big can of worms, but we should look into it.
• lmandel: even if they're not authoring they should be able to consume the content.
• hallvord: on the composing side of things we should look at the issues.
• miketaylr: Mobile frameworks such as zepto, sencha, etc. And also testing platforms with continuous integration.
• lmandel: that's fine for now. we can start to think of other things on the wiki, these are good ideas.

[action] lmandel to summarize on the wiki.

Topic: B2G 1.1 and B2G 1.2 UA override PR (kdubost)

One bug for the two changes or one bug for each version. One bug for each version seems counter effective. So from now on can we agree that the modification of ua-override is cross version. It's a kind of out of distribution before it really is.

• karl: I was starting to remove UA overrides for 1.2 (master). but we had a discussion that it would be good to do for 1.1 as well. started to ask around and was told to just open one bug and people would take in those changes to the different versions of 1.1. The latest status is ~"I can't merge because there are too many conflicts". In the future, should I use one bug for all versions? Or make different patches for different versions?
• blassey: i'd like us to move to the dynamic overrides. so this would just be for 1.1 (should have dynamic overrides in 1.2).
• lmandel: who should we speak to to understand requesting changes?
• blassey: there's a bug filed (912215) for the serverside, but we don't understand everything about it yet.
• blassey: we want to blow away the existing prefs and only use the dynamic one. I think we can ship what's in the override list for 1.2 now as a base, then we'll update from there.
• karl: ok cool.

Topic: Priviledged communication channel with Microsoft (kdubost)

Should we have a similar system than the one we have with Google?

• should we use support tickets for big sites?
• karl: We are developing a successful relationship with Google. Things are getting fixed.
• applause*
• karl: I was wondering if this model could be applied to some other big companies which have a lot of properties, i.e., Yahoo!, Microsoft, qq, Yandex. Should we push for a model where we have a private list? It seems to help solve a lot of issues. The bad thing is that it reduces community participation.
• lmandel: That doesn't seem like a huge issue to me. It's just a small number of large sites. I would be in favor if we can find the right contacts.
• karl: I might be able to find people at Yandex. Yahoo, I might have contacts.
• blassey: we probably have some decent contacts from Yahoo! due to hires.
• vishy: I know the marketplace people have some good contacts for Yandex as well.
• karl: Is it hard to create a private mailing list for contacts like this?
• lmandel: nope. just request it.

Topic: Work This Week

What will you be working on during the next week?

• blassey:
• hallvors: Test Spade! AWCY? Process for adding new URLs to automated testing. Pushing test results to AWCY backend. Make AWCY 2 check live bug status. Highlight changed test results in UI.
• jsmith:resolvedresolved
• kdubost: bugs and editing wiki to simplify the documentations.
• lmandel:
• miketaylr: ua lib testing, bug triage, jQuery Austin conf (Tuesday & Wednesday)

Topic: Web Compatibility Progress

This week bug for the new batch of modifications on ua-override-prefs.js is Bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=911260

• karl: we've closed a lot of bugs. but we have a lot of new bugs. we need to do some triage.

Bugs This Week

FIXED

• 722138 Rightmove mobile site does not render cleanly like stock browser
• 829478 mail.google.com doesn't recognize B2G as mobile
• 888714 m.funnyordie.com can’t play a video
• 887715 m.cda.pl can’t play a video
• 841108 Video not working with Ooyala's video player
• 786065 ig.com.br videos show as unavailable due to UA sniffing
• 884264 nydailynews.com doesn't display correctly in Gaia browser
• 843134 news.google.com doesn't recognize B2G UA as mobile
• 737719 Cannot operate app buttons or control video on WSJ Live website
• 737715 Cannot play videos on vault.atlrec.com
• 902911 mobile.mtv.es can’t play a video
• 888725 m.tvland.com can’t play a video
• 902890 m.terra.com/videos can’t play a video
• 902896 m.panorama.com.ve can’t play a video
• 888730 m.howcast.com can’t play a video
• 902894 m.futbolred.com can’t play a video
• 802981 Cannot navigate maps.google.com in browser app on the device

NEW (7 days)

• 913590 lepoint.fr returns desktop site for firefox OS
• 913633 platform.js miscategorizes FF for Android and Firefox OS browsers
• 913189 ua.js library fails to recognize Firefox OS as mobile device.

Tracked Actions

ONGOING =

• TODO-20130715-01: kdubost have a panorama of tools used by Web developers for testing. Write a post about it.
• TODO-20130729-01: kdubost To draft ideas around a tool for doing the Ébauche in Web Compatibility testing. Think about kind of YSlow report for Web Compat. Enter the URI, and get a simple report of potential issues. Could be useful for helping with bug reporting.
• TODO-20130805-02: hallvord to test in bulk if Web sites are still working with a device information into the UA string Firefox OS. (Bug 901039)
• TODO-20130806-01: kdubost to create a script to automatically compile stats from Tech Evangelism - Mobile. See email.
• TODO-20130819-01 kdubost to create a first workflow for Web Badges for the community with Carla Cassili
• TODO-20130819-03: lmandel to follow up with Gerv about posting UA device/model recommendations on MDN.
• TODO-20130826-01: kdubost to create an intro guide to be ready to participate to Web Compatibility effort.
• TODO-20130826-02: kdubost to create 101 on Web compatibility issues so Mozilla employes have handy materials to discuss with partners.
• TODO-20130909-01 Hallvord to do analysis on list of video sites from lmandel.
• TODO-20130909-02 lmandel to send list of video sites to hallvors

DONE

(move the DONE action items below and add the string DONE and possibly link to the record)

• TODO-20130826-03: kdubost to create a new bug and a Pull Request for all changes on B2G 1.1 [DONE 2013-09-03]
• TODO-20130822-01: kdubost to write an article on hacks.mozilla.org about UA detection techniques and their consequences. - deadline: 20130830 [DONE 2013-08-30]