Platform/2009-Q4-Goals

General Goals

• Improve product responsiveness and startup performance.
• Drive towards process separation with a focus on Fennec.
• Improve web capabilities.
• ARM Support
  • Testing infra
  • Crash reporting
• Release Firefox 3.6

GFX

• Performance: specifically, responsiveness.
  • Create an automated responsiveness/interactivity benchmark.
  • Improve Gecko/Firefox's score on that benchmark substantially (at least 25%).
  • Support and/or participate in the startup time work being done by the Firefox group.
  • Participate in the Electrolysis project by adding support for windowless plugins on Windows.

Win Integration

• Address any Win7 compatibility issues that show up

Layout

• Improve the Web platform by contributing to tests and specifications
  • Publish CSS3 Selectors as CR [fantasai]
  • Ongoing development of reftest infrastructure for the W3C [fantasai, jwatt]
• Improve the Web platform by implementing key features
  • Land Harfbuzz prototype integration in tree (allows for richer typographic control, also lays groundwork for performance improvements) [jfkthame]
  • Implement calc() (Web platform) [dbaron]
  • Support CSS transitions/SVG animation on nearly all CSS values (browser parity) [dbaron, dholbert]
  • Enable SVG Animation with shippable feature set (near-complete CSS property coverage, near-complete SVG attribute coverage, but not necessarily syncbase timing) (Acid3, browser parity) [dholbert, birtles, jwatt]
• Improve perceived and measured performance
  • CSS scanner performance analysis and improvements (performance) [zwol]
  • Implement some kind of lazy frame construction [?] (still working out a plan)
  • Compositor phase 2 --- paint and animation control (performance, also add JS animation API to the platform) [roc]
• Improve core code architecture to improve stability/performance and reduce cost of future enhancements
  • Simplify frame destruction [fantasai]
• General product improvement
  • fix scroll position restoration and maintenance (bugs 43114 / 103279) [dbaron]

Video/Audio

• Video on ARM - 15fps on N900 full-screen?
• 'buffered' and 'seekable' TimeRanges [cpearce]
• Remove dependency on libfishsound, liboggz, and liboggplay [doublec]
• Experimental implementation of accelerated full-screen video using cairo-gl [kinetik]

Mac OS X

• Resolve Mac OS X Java situation for Firefox 3.6.
• Fix any major regressions in 64-bit Mac OS X builds.
• Complete initial performance analysis of 64-bit Mac OS X builds. Should include comparison with 32-bit builds on 10.6 for major benchmarks.
• Fix all known regresssions in Cocoa NPAPI, make it ready to ship.

Content

• XBL2
  • Implement remaining binding mechanisms (rollover from last quarter)
  • Implement support for mutations of childlists and the anonymous tree
  • Implement xbl:attr and xbl:text
  • Land document-audit patch on trunk
• Move the web forward by implementing more of HTML5
  • Get our HTML5 history API landed
  • Finish the off main thread parsing work
  • Speculative loading with the HTML5 parser
  • Evaluate what parts, if any, of HTML5 to implement next
• Electrolysis
  • Implement JPW (cross process JS wrappers)
  • HTTP over IPC, details TBD - ? What does this mean?
• Improve performance
  • Non-blocking cache writes for page load landed
  • Staying on trace through same origin XOWs
  • Remove the XBL1 CSS based binding mechanism for non-displayed DOM nodes
  • Use our (almost) lock-free data structures for our main event queue
  • Optimize DOM child storage for performance
  • Minimize XPConnect wrapper morphing and the number of XPCOM tearoffs we create from JS

JS

• ES5
  • Complete implementation

• Tracing
  • trace more complex recursion
  • trace switch-statement style emulators

• Performance
  • continue sunspider improvements (within 20% of Chrome 3 on Windows Vista)
  • improve v8 benchmark performance substantially (at least 2x vs. Oct1 trunk)
  • jsval 64-bit representation

• Continue GC redesign
  • GC perf tests
  • see JavaScript:SpiderMonkey:GC Futures

Accessibility

• Event handling performance implementation (for DHTML)
  • Code reorganization
  • Implementation of throttling and/or delayed computation and/or smarter caching
  • Crashers
• Fix keyboard support for HTML5 contentEditable
  • Add accessibility support for HTML controls inside of a contentEditable
• Polish table/grid/treegrid accessibility
  • issues with some existing complex DHTML tables (e.g. dojo)
  • vendor reported issues

Multi-Process

• Shippable multi-process Flash, windowed and windowless on Windows (and Linux)
• Complete necko API revisions necessary to support multi-process networking
• Usable prototype of Fennec running multi-process on Linux
• Usable prototype of multi-process Flash on Mac OSX 10.6 (has external dependencies)
• Completed gecko API changes necessary for multi-process session history and link targeting