Platform/2009-Q3-Goals

General Goals

• Improve product responsiveness.
• Drive towards process separation.
• Improve web capabilities.
• Support Firefox 3.5.1 by driving, implementing, and fixing web platform features that are required.

GFX

• Research multiprocess graphics issues.
  • Support & participate in Mozilla Electrolysis project. (joe)
  • Resolve how to accomplish hardware accelerated graphics in a multiprocess, sandboxed world. (joe)
  • (maybe) Prototype multiprocess hardware acceleration. (joe)
  • Measure and decide how font metrics caches will work in multiprocess (startup time and memory usage) (joe)
• Continue hardware acceleration work.
  • Continue work on prototype hardware acceleration to extend it to two platforms total. (joe)
  • Above notes for hardware accelerated graphics in multiprocess & sandboxed world.
• Improve Cairo software rendering performance. Possibly includes: (jrmuizel)
  • stroke_to_path
  • perf improvements for glyph rendering
  • image scaling performance improvements
  • other things that are slow in cairo that people need sped up (suggestions please!)
• Improve cairo capabilities. (jrmuizel)
  • high quality downscaling
  • develop a plan to resolve image drawing/EXTEND_PAD mess
  • need Source clipping? (would improve efficiency of border-image, see current nsIImage::Extract() hack) (need some numbers...)
  • (not-likely) Supersampling to eliminate curve seams? see bug 466572
• Font system enhancements (jdaggett)
  • Refine font feature support spec with prototype implementation
  • Implement support for unicode-range descriptor
  • Crude implementation of SVG font support
• Image decode on demand/draw (bholley)
• Win integration work (jimm)
  • Improvements to parental controls support (blocked content management, extension manager support).
  • Win7 specific
    • Taskbar drop lists support for Firefox and Thunderbird.
    • Support for tablet pc pen events.
    • Touch input improvements (Prototype new gesture events for touch input rather than using mouse event simulations, smarter text selection logic, "big pointer" UI improvements?, implement smarter toggle zoom).
    • General: make sure new win7 features are covered (including tests!)

Layout

• Keep working on CSS WG duties (dbaron, fantasai)
• Improve web capabilites.
  • SVG/SMIL complete enough that we enable it by default (dholbert)
  • Implement SVG/SMIL bug fixes and features (birtles)
  • Implement SVG images (roc)
  • Land CSS Transitions (dbaron)
  • Harfbuzz text backend prototype in tree (jfkthame) Possible security and performance improvements as well
  • Animation control via compositor, including JS animation API (roc) Performance improvement, front-end assistance
  • An implementation of SVG pointer-events for HTML (jwatt)
  • Get some of our tests into the official SVG test suite in a reftest-like format (jwatt) Good for SVG, should help us do better in comparisons
• Clean up and simplify code.
  • Simplify GTK2 widget code (e.g. remove mozdrawingarea) (karlt)
  • Clean up some block layout code (remove float cache, remove float continuations) (fantasai)
• Improve responsiveness and performance.
  • CSS rule matching performance improvements (zwol)
• Improve security.
  • Implement dead-frame exploit mitigation (zwol)

Video/Audio

• Rapidly resolve any critical issues uncovered by the Firefox 3.5 release (doublec, kinetik, cpearce)
• Improve performance in some significant way (e.g., be able to drop frames without decoding them) (doublec, kinetik, cpearce)

Mac OS X

• Complete 64-bit Mac OS X port that runs on Mac OS X 10.6, bug 468509.
• Complete NPAPI Cocoa event model implementation, bug 435041.
• Be prepared for Mac OS X 10.6 on all branches.
  • Notify QA of seed releases.
  • Track any major regressions.

Content

• Continue implementation of HTML5 parser.
  • Advertise the HTML5 parsers availability to testers to get more feedback.
  • Off main thread HTML5 parsing as a prerequisite for turning HTML5 parsing on by default.
  • Propose a long term plan for the generated C++ in the HTML5 parser.
• Make significant progress on XBL2.
  • Attachment, detachment, through all three binding mechanisms.
  • Initial rendering of the shadow tree.
  • Insertion points (<children>).
• Improve extension security and ease of development
  • Design and implement an way for JetPack to safely expose APIs to untrusted code.
  • Propose an API to add names to the global namespace from JS extensions.
• Improve DOM performance.
  • Evaluate the feasibility of proposals such as IndexOf() redesign (per bz's proposal in mozilla.dev.tech.dom) and changing DOM node child list storage from array to linked list or maybe B-tree with backpointers from DOM-nodes to B-tree nodes.
  • Profile DOM performance problems beyond the JS to C++ bridge.
• Implement a prototype of multi-process networking.
  • Write a test application with a child process that does plain HTTP over IPC through necko in the main process.

Accessibility

• Complete (and harmonize) accessible exposure of XUL and content based tables and tree grids. (related tracker: bug 491681)
• Improve our text attribute support with respect to the IAccessible2 specification. (related tracker: bug 368895)
• Update ARIA attribute support in accordance with browser implementation guide updates. (related tracker: bug 343213)
  • Participate in the ARIA User Agent Implementation Task Force (UAI TF)
• Participate in the improvement of user keyboard interaction with HTML 5 media elements.
• Investigate improving user experience for heavily updating DHTML applications
  • analysis of what we currently do with a highly mutating dom. (e.g. bug 500240)
  • performance: look at lowering our churn in response to DOM mutation (tree walking, event firing etc), consider more event throttling, identify dom noise.
  • stability and correctness: identify how to make our interrogation of content and layout more sensitive ("safe times").

Multi-Process

• Working Flash plugin in a separate process, on Windows and Linux
• Multiprocess tab milestones
  • Networking
  • Global history
  • link targeting and session history navigation
• Write a line-item plan and schedule for the remaining pieces of phase 2