Compatibility/Mobile/2013-11-11

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


Topic: next meeting

Next meeting: The next meeting will be on November 18, 2013.

Dec 20 to January 1, Holidays. No meeting during those dates. Dec 23 and 30 meetings are cancelled.

Topic: target _top bug (karl)

We have the Target _top bug which is sitting there for a long time. Do we need to send this back to QA? Somewhere else? Is it something we should change on our side if it's working in other browsers?

  • karl: If I understand the bug, it seems that Firefox OS is behaving differently than other browsers.
  • hallvord: I think we should send it to core or the app backend people. It seems like they have a technical solution but haevn't gotten around to it yet. It seems counterproductive to contact people to add the workaround becuase we haven't fix our bug yet.
  • karl: so we should move it rather than let it sit in Firefox OS General
  • brad: I would put this in Firefox OS Browser
  • lawrence: Is that the right component?
  • brad: If it's not the browser, then System might be a better guess (But it's the same team). This should def. be fixed on our side. I'm going to move that right now.

Topic: Managing site contacts (lmandel)

We currently track site contacts on an internal wiki page. I would like to explore alternative tools for managing contacts with the goals of:

  • tracking communication across multiple sessions
  • easy access to history
  • enable easy sharing of contacts

Thomas Elin (Mozilla BD) gave Karl and Lawrence and overview of Salesforce (CRM). I would like to get the rest of the team's input on usefulness.

  • lawrence: Before saying we're going to use that, I'd like to know what the team thinks about this. I don't want there to be a lot of overhead but want something nicer to keep track of contacts.
  • brad: related note, Mike should now have a LinkedIn Pro account (in theory).
  • lawrence: there are cheaper options than Salesforce or open source solutions like Sugar CRM. Doesn't even have to be CRM. But how are we going to manage these relationships in a better way than just archiving on webcompat-internal.
  • hallvord: I think some CRM-ish stuff is a good idea. We used a similar tool back at Opera and it was useful. The big question for me is how volunteers might get access if we envision them doing some contacting.
  • lawrence: 1) we're contacting a large number of sites across a number of internal Mozilla teams, we need to manage and keep track of the various contacts that we find 2) a tool like salesforce, at some point if we have trusted web openers within the volunteer community, it's reasonable to assume that we'd be willing to pay for accounts for them to have access. We do need some kind of wall because this information is private contact information.
  • hallvord: That sounds good.
  • karl: I wonder about the privacy implications of this. Do we have the right to collect and store this information without people's consent?
  • lawrence: I don't know the answer. We've asked the Privacy team and haven't received an answer. If we're going to make a change we should inform them of that change.
  • karl: When you contact people what is the information that you need? I need the name of the person, the department they work in, and often the related bugs that they've been involven in.
  • mike: That sounds good to me. Can't think of anything else I might need.
  • lawrence: OK, if you have any more suggestions please give to me.
  • karl: If you find a tool that is useful or have an idea, please bring it up on the list.

Topic: Minion (karl)

Can we get a short overview of Minion and how Stefan is helping automated testing?

  • karl: Stefan is working on a tool to check security issues for webapps. They have a pool of servers that they can use to parallelize tests. He suggested that we might be able to use his tool for things related to web compatibility. I was thinking about link@rel=icon which will create issues for FxOS tablets, but there might be other things that we want to test. First question: is it useful to invest time in this area? How does it overlap with what Hallvord and Seif are doing together? If it's useful, what kinds of tests can we do?
  • hallvord: Is it at heart a python script that simulates a browser or is it a browser engine?
  • karl: Minion is a python tool that does whatever you want it to, based on plugins that you write. For example it has some tests that run based on PhantomJS. If you have a plugin that's you've written based on SlimerJS it can control it with minion. Once you have a tool, Stefan is happy to massage it to work inside of minion.
  • hallvord: OK, so minion is more of the infrastructure.
  • lawrence: We've talked about Spade, seif's tools, now Minion. We just need one that does whatever it is that we need to do. Just moving to a new tool for the sake of moving to a new tool. In general I'm fine with us exploring tools as long as we're getting something new out of it.
  • mike: Has Stefan already run those tests for you?
  • karl: We wrote a test on Friday but I haven't seen him today yet.
  • hallvord: I think it sounds like the stuff Seif is doing could easily be converted into a plugin for minion. That way we could run Seif's stuff in Minion's distributed architecture. Get the best of both worlds.

Topic: UA detection use cases (karl, mike)

Karl and Mike ran a survey on UA detection use cases. https://etherpad.mozilla.org/uadetection-usecases Any themes, thoughts, etc. at this point?

  • karl: Last week we invited people to particpate in the Etherpad to define the use cases for UA detection. It was surprisingly successful. The direct outcome is: it's complicated, it's depressing, it's messy. As for the analysis, I want to try to better categorize the data and see what's related to web compatibility, issues related to the platform, and ... "other" stuff.
  • miketaylr: It was interesting to see how people from the framework were excited and participated. I need to go back and re-digest everything that's been written.
  • lawrence: There's lots of use-cases here with nuanced differences that might be boiled down to something simpler like "I want to know the OS of a device". We should document/link to technical solutions on how to achieve what people are trying to do, or point out where no good platform solution exists.
  • karl: Nowhere in the use cases is it pointed out the consequences or constraints of some of these solutions.
  • lawrence: Let's have a page pointing out the pros and cons of UA sniffing _and_ the alternatives.
  • brad: we should transfer this over to the wiki. From that wiki I think it would be great to have a deep-diving discussion for some of the larger issues, e.g., serving images.
  • lawrence: We can do this on MDN too.

TODO for karl and mike to do categorization.


Topic: Video survey (hallvord)

I've scanned through about 140 "video sites" (from a Google search, though somewhat vetted manually to exclude sites that were purely reviews, sites that just listed "best video sites" etc.)

  • Gathered some stats by URL playing with different user agents
  • Manual comparison where stats indicated differences

Reported 16 bugs


  • hallvord: One of the interesting observations, there is a huge long-tail of video sites that are desktop sites only. Once I had like 140 related video sites it turned out that a significant chunk, half or perhaps more had only desktop versions. Many of them serving Flash, some Window Media. How do we evangelize sites that serve compilations from different sources?
  • lawrence: e.g., if they're serving Youtube content let's make sure they're serving the mobile stuff. The desktop stuff seems like it's out of scope right now. It would be useful to have a list of desktop-only video sites to reference in the future.
  • hallvord: TODO summarize desktop-only sites. I only reported bugs on sites where a mobile version exists and we get the desktop version, or something doesn't work elsewhere. There's probably about 20 bugs filed from this work so far. I'd like to generate more tests for my extensions.
  • lawrence: I want to document as much as possible what we've done. It's a large effort and people don't quite understand the topic.
  • hallvord: There are a few more bugs left to analyze as well. And then they're all yours Karl.

webcompat.com (mike)

When can we get the planet aggregator set up?

  • miketaylr: karl volunteered to do the CSS. And I need to collect a couple of blogs. But let's say that by Friday it will be probably done. The good news is that Venus (Planet) is dead simple for adding new blogs. I will ask Paul Irish as well.
  • blassey: a tag webcompat on blogs can help if there is a need to select.
  • karl: hallvord do you plan to have a new one?
  • hallvord: I want, I miss mine.
  • lawrence: Is there someone we can ask from Opera?
  • karl: There are changes for weblogs so in the future.

Topic: Broken Voices of the Web

Topic: Things which have been discussed

These are a list of topics, we need to explore further and take action items. It usually needs an owner and a set of actions. Putting them here for not forgetting about them. (this could become the start of a newsletter about the project by month)

  • Stefan is helping us for Web Compatibility stuff by plugging in/beefing up the tools Minion they are using for testing security.


Topic: Web Compatibility Progress

FIXED (no DUPLICATE)

NEW

Tracked Actions

ONGOING

(move the DONE action items below and add the string DONE and possibly link to the record)
  • TODO-20130715-01: kdubost have a panorama of tools used by Web developers for testing. Write a post about it.
  • 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-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.

DONE

  • TODO-20130806-01: kdubost to create a script to automatically compile stats from Tech Evangelism - Mobile. See email. DONE.
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