Platform/2012-11-06

« previous week | index | next week »

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

• Most B2G engineers are in SF for their workweek
• Convergence schedule for remainder of the year announced
  • We're currently in C1 until Nov 19, followed by an Exec Review
• Landing process per-milestone has also been documented

Firefox Desktop

Release update

Next Merge Day: 0 days
Firefox 17.0 Release: 0 days

• Shooting for a Thursday push for FF17 beta 5 (going to build today)
• Beta 6 will go to build Monday, targeting EOD PT - only a small handful of critical fixes will be approved for landing at this point
• Beta 6 will ship next Wednesday, and the merge from m-b to m-r should occur shortly after
• Merge and release will occur Monday 11/19 and Tuesday 11/20
  • Thanksgiving coverage has been lined up in case a critical FF17 issue requires investigation

Development update

• Dao landed another Snappy fix to avoid doing unecessary work during startup, bug 756313
• New round of fixes went into beta 4 for Social API, including a more discoverable method to remove the feature, and better error handling on lack of network connectivity scenarios. bug 803344, bug 804258, bug 804910
• Stub installer metrics landed, yay! bug 802734 - good teamwork from UX/Privacy/metrics/dev/rel-mgmt
• Please test around bug 807217 to ensure that Social API disabled in PB mode is working as expected

Firefox Mobile

\o/Check out Finkle's Blog

Remote Web Console for Android is here!

• http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2012/10/firefox-for-android-remote-web-console-is-here/

Responsiveness

• bug 785945 - Awesomescreen entries are very slow to appear
• Quickly closing tabs with swipe gesture is better: bug 770492 - Quick sliding to close tabs will not dismiss them anymore at some point

Usability

• Fix for honeycomb issue landed in Fx18 and Fx19: bug 787318 - Tabs thumbnails are not updated
• fullscreen elements prevent screen timeout bug 805017 - Disable screen timeout when DOMFullscreen is enabled

IME Awesome Continues

• bug 805162 - Rewrite Android IME code to be thread safe
• bug 806349 - Input auto-correction is not enabled

Safe Browsing

• Freshly landed on Inbound (not for Fx17 for which Safe Browsing is a theme): bug 806422 - Do not cache Complete's across a Safe Browsing update

Stability Wins

• bug 797705 - java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.GeckoEvent.createNativeGestureEvent(GeckoEvent.java
• bug 804926 - java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.GeckoApp.requestRender(GeckoApp.java)
• bug 781259 - java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.DoorHangerPopup$3.run(DoorHangerPopup.java)
• bug 799877 - java.lang.IllegalStateException: at android.widget.ListView.layoutChildren(ListView.java) with Adapter(class org.mozilla.gecko.AllPagesTab$AwesomeBarCursorAdapter)

Telemetry Probes

• FENNEC_STARTUP_* probes
• FENNEC_AWESOMEBAR_ALLPAGES_EMPTY_TIME
• FENNEC_THUMBNAILS_COUNT, FENNEC_FAVICONS_COUNT, PLACES_PAGES_COUNT, PLACES_BOOKMARK_COUNTS

Metro [Weekly]

Product

• First draft of users stories ready for review: etherpad

UX

• Iteration on remote tabs: mockup , bug 801056
• Semantic zoom on start page: mockup , bug 807867
• Iterating on "About Firefox" in setting charm: bug 807691
• Reviewed FX Metro user stories and matching them with user actions: etherpad
• Keep focusing on designing P1 features: snap view, bookmarks, topsite UI implementation.

Engineering

• VC2010 backport is complete on elm. Should have vc10 elm builders doing nightlies this week.
• bug 795887 - Cache corruption should be significantly reduced in Metro due to Firefox closing the cache when it is suspended, r+ed, landing this week.
• Elm to mc merge work continues.

Project Management

• Proposed new iteration model for development, under review and will post publicly once first draft is agreed to by core team.
• First pass at time estimations done and total under review, will post once information is validated.

Stability Report [Weekly]

Desktop

• Flash
  • New version of Flash shipped today: Adobe Flash Player version 11.5.502.110
• Trunk
  • bug 808531 crash in mozilla::MediaPipelineTransmit::PipelineListener::NotifyQueuedTrackChanges
  • 6 of the top 10 are image or gfx crashes, we need people to look into those: https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/19.0a1/7
• Beta
  • bug 808561 crash in nsDisplayListBuilder::DisplayCaret
• Aurora
  • bug 806820 crash in SuppressDeletedPropertyHelper
• Release
  • bug 807684 crash in libnortonconfidential16.dylib@0x22f6d @ libsystem_c.dylib with Norton Confidential
  • bug 807923 crash in browsemngr.dll@0x11a176 with Browser Manager 2.3.796.11 bundled with Babylon

Mobile

B2G

• KaiRo created a daily list of B2G on-device crashes, new ones will be generated every day automatically from now on. Today's version (yesterday's data): https://crash-analysis.mozilla.com/rkaiser/2012-11-05/2012-11-05.b2g.crashes.html
• Symbols for unagi are now being uploaded, needs bug 809116 to actually be used on the crash-stats server.
• Please test the crash reporting UI (and make sure crashes are sent at least when on wifi)!

Snappy [Weekly]

• Snappy #43: Big improvements: faster startup? Smoother tabstrip!
• Nov 1 Snappy minutes

• Start-up
  • Firefox median startup performance (as measured by SIMPLE_MEASURES_FIRST_PAINT) improved between 20%-25% at the end of Firefox 18 cycle (~Oct 26).
  • Dão Gottwald postponed loading content until Firefox chrome is painted (bug 756313). This will result in browser chrome painting sooner.

• Tab Strip
  • Bas Schouten landed Azure (Windows 8) caching for gradients, which is useful when rendering border corners. (bug 805831 This should speed up tab-strip drawing when 2d-acceleration is used.
  • Neil Deakin made two changes to avoid unnecessary layout flushes
    • changed popup.xml's state getter to not flush frames when retrieving state (bug 792296)
    • prevented scrollbox.ensureElementIsVisible() from being called if the tab strip doesn't overflow (bug 752376.

• Content
  • Matt Woodrow significantly improved the performance of the periodic table demo (bug 806256). However, performance is still poor with Direct2D (bug 808838).

• Tools
  • Benoit Girard updated the profiler to support linking to a specific view. Just grab the URL to share your current view. Read about more updates on Benoit's blog

Games [1st Tuesday of Month]

• As-yet-unnamed benchmark suite
  • Focus on real-world, leaning towards gaming and emscripten
  • Cross browser (Firefox [release/beta/aurora/nightly/tinderbox], Chrome, IE, Safari, Opera)
  • Desktop and mobile
  • Been hoping to deploy soon, but ran into stability issues on mobile that required some rearchitecting.
  • Will send sample results to dev.platform/dev.firefox soon; goal is an arewefastyet-style display for gaming & emscripten work
  • [result screenshot]

• Game porting efforts, .NET -> JS
  • We've been working with Kevin Gadd, author of JSIL, one of the .NET -> JS porting tools
  • Goal is to get various frameworks and tools that use .NET running on the web (e.g. XNA, what a lot of xbox live arcade games are built on top of)
  • Complementing our emscripten porting efforts
  • There are other approaches possible, still evaluating what's best

• Web Audio
  • Progressing, implementation framework is in place, Ehsan is working to get it to play sounds (via media streams) soon

• Games triage flags
  • [games:p1/p2/p3] or p? in the whiteboard
  • Vlad will be looking to find owners for the P1s very soon; many of them are in JS-land and are performance things that we at least want to make sure we have ways to reproduce and track

• Other smaller team projects
  • animation frame rate smoothing
    • eventually intelligent adaptation based on content
    • eventually vsync
  • WebGL compositing speedup and optimization
    • good interaction with OMTC
    • multi-buffering to remove stalls
  • BananaBread Multiplayer
    • Currently working to get it working with WebSockets
    • Once done, will move on to add in Peer to Peer support using WebRTC
    • Two new levels for capture the flag approved

Mobile Web Compat [2nd Tuesday of Month]

Critsmash [3rd Tuesday of Month]

Memshrink [4th Tuesday of Month]

Engineering Metrics

0.0	0.0 days	0.0 days	70 bugs	29 bugs
Patch Review Time	SG:Crit Resolution Time	Top Crash Resolution Time	Unresolved Aurora Trackers (non-security, not tracked for Beta)	Unresolved Beta Trackers (non-security)

• BUG IN NIGHTLY
• Burn up/down charts accurate
  • http://people.mozilla.org/~klahnakoski/
• Review history revised and fixed based on feedback
  • https://metrics.mozilla.com/bugzilla-analysis/ReviewHistory.html
• Review queue times (first review, all reviews, etc coming)
  • Based on % of reviews in the last 18 weeks done in 24 hours
    • Break out first reviews as well
  • There is a long slow "leak" of old patches - decide if they matter

Key Issues

Actions Last Week

• jet to staff social performance profiling, layout-side
• jet/jkew to take the text, layout top crashers
• jp to see about moztrap presentation in future weeks
• dmandelin to follow up on test dir re-org thread
• ehsan to update tree policy page on Ts regression backout policy for desktop and provide link
  • link to policy
• finkle Ts follow up for mobile
  • Finkle talked to the Android testing team and we might update the Ts test to be more realistic, but even for now, it does a good job of testing the "Load link from other app into Firefox" use case. Ts matters.

Issues

• Changes to JS components/JSMs (khuey)

Actions

• Ehsan to update talos regression page to include mobile
• JP to follow up on FF19 Gfx top crashes

Roundtable

• gps is soliciting input for a brown bag on the build system. https://etherpad.mozilla.org/build-system-brownbag
• (catlee) B2G builds on TBPL
• (catlee) HG downtime cancelled - may not be necessary now
• (catlee) Android tests running on panda boards on cedar branch
• (catlee) releng and IT want to add Windows 8 64-bit to tbpl but want to check if it is enough to not need to also add Windows 8 32-bit
  • This is posted on dev.platform https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/QNKVMKenJ8E
  • This would save maintenance time and cost and allow higher capacity for Win8 64-bit
  • Any objections? Sounds good?
• (curtisk) Security Champions - looking for people that want to be the champion for the area the normally work in. This is the thing from the Mon meeting Curtis talked about.
  • meeting in J/K (IRL/Vidyo) 1300 PDT 6-Nov or contact Curtis