Firefox2/StatusMeetings/2006-02-28

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In Attendance

annie, axel, autonome, beltzner, ben, bsmedberg, brakowski, brettw, darin, dveditz, gavin, jhughes, mconnor, markp, rebron, rob_strong, timr

Agenda

1. Alpha 1 Status
2. Firefox 2 Feature Status Roundtable
3. Any other business

Alpha 1 Status

Features

• Places infrastructure (performance, stability, toolbar drag & drop)
  • performance (Tp, Ts) has gotten better, close to status quo if not better
  • problems with memory leak on balsa that we're trying to track down; this is blocking us as we can't turn it on. We're not sure that this is even Places that's doing it.
    • dveditz: the whole point of "WARN_IF_FALSE" was to warn instead of fail on an assertion.
    • darin: I'm gonna rack that up to maybe a typo in nsDebug.h?
    • ben: maybe we can flip places on?
    • beltzner: will post to devnews tonight, then flip it on for Weds morning

• Undo Close Tab
  • at a hard decision about what approach to take
    • either hide-the-tab, try to leverage bfcache, or just try to preserve form data retention
  • will be able to get it ready for A1 based on one of these directions, assuming we still want to
    • beltzner: I think we should get at least one of these directions in place
  • darin: why would we use bfcache?
  • bsmedberg: it might help persist full state while not allowing plugins and media to run in the background (which would happen with hide-the-tab)
  • darin: need to be careful about onunload handlers and other things that disable bfcache
  • mconnor: if I can't figure out a way to make it work consistently, we might want to push this off to A2 or even extension-land

• Tab Overflow

• Extension Blacklisting
  • patch waiting for review

• Extension Dependencies
  • landed, no regressions

• Search Plugin Format Changeover (with sherlock import)
  • review going well, working through Ben's comments
  • not going to move to toolkit based on feedback in d-a-f
  • looking to have a new patch for review soon (today/tomorrow)

• Spell-As-You-Type (english only)
  • it's on trunk already (without the dictionary) --enable-extension: spellcheck? there are instructions in the enable spell check bug
  • still blocked on licensing, who do I talk to about this? mscott for starters.
  • ben: where does the dictionary file? what needs to happen with the build system to get it included?
  • bsmedberg: point me to that please and we can get this started

• Instrumentation Infrastructure
  • good progress on getting server infrastructure up and running
  • should move this off to A2
  • the exit survey will be in place for Firefox 1.5.0.2, morgamic is doing the final bits of work for the web app
    • also thinking about entrance survey
    • action beltzner cc darin on bug 314119

• RSS parser
  • ben needs to check in with robert, think it's stuck waiting for a review

• RSS content detection (?)
  • we think we're good here; not in darin's review queue anymore, at any rate

Blockers

• version number / branding
  • currently set at 1.5, should it be 2.0a1?
  • benjamin: yes, that's what mscott's doing
  • dveditz: should we also change the trunk, which is currently 1.6a1?
  • benjamin: mscott has all of these under proposal
  • action beltzner to take this as an action
• davel: when we push 2.0a1 to the beta-update channel, will these users get a choice?
  • darin: yes, if we set something as a "major" release, they'll get a choice
  • bsmedberg: it would be a good idea to test this code path on the nightly?
  • annie: I think there's a lot of users who don't realize that they're on a beta channel right now, so we shouldn't be pushing the alpha onto the 1.5 beta channel
  • action for darin to synch up with preed(?) to make sure that everyone's up to speed
  • action for QA to test the 1.5.x update logic for user choice
• ben: release notes? documentation for MDC?
  • promote it as a developer release
  • mconnor: do we even want to promote it as that? some of these APIs are going to change?
  • beltzner: but we want that feedback, don't we?
  • mconnor: I'm worried about getting dugg, and getting bug feedback that we don't really care about anyway
  • ben: maybe do it invite only?
  • mconnor: get the release download numbers from Asa

Status Updates

Places

• performance was good, no known data corruption issues
• annie's prepared some solid estimates, I need to do that and get it from the rest of the team
• action ben to meet with schrep next monday

Tabbed Browsing

• nothing beyond what's been discussed

Extension Manager Enhancements

• Extension Dependencies - phase 1 landed - no regressions so far
• Extension Blacklisting - patch ready for review last Friday
• Extension Locales - started
• Extension UI - mockups and proof of concept started

Installer

• Windows Installer - nothing new other than work on this will start again this week
  • bsmedberg: is DOM Inspector part of the product or not?
  • first requirement is to be able to provide variable paths for distribution and packaging of our installer
  • now we're starting to talk about creating various levels of stub install: stub with full code, stub with all code but not optional code, stub with no code.
    • bsmedberg: but do we consider DOM inspector part of the application or not?
    • rob_strong: put it on AMO?
    • beltzner: we need to figure out a way to make sure that it's there for users who need it, but not there for users who aren't there
• Branding and Locale installer customization - nothing new

Search Engine UI

• Back end work complete
• Updated patch today or tomorrow - needs review from mconnor
  • Addressed ben's SR comments
• Code to remain in /browser per discussion on dev.apps.firefox
• Re-factoring of the Sherlock parsing code to be completed seperately if time permits (low priority)
• Need to discuss search plugin format further

Visual/UI Refresh

• requirements for the visual refresh are on the wiki
  • will be creating a new space for discussion of this theme (dev.apps.firefox.newtheme) and trying to figure out some place to provide hosting for mockups and images
• met with ben and jhughes yesterday to discuss changes to the default chrome for the browser window, the outcome of which was posted to dev.apps.firefox

Platform Uplift

• SVG textPath needs to get an answer and attention in the next 2 weeks, thus I make a commitment here that I will produce a landing scenario for them by March 10.

• no new status on UTF-16 XPCOM I/O fixes.

• schedule for platform uplift deadlines no longer clear due to schedule strategy shift; will try to build something new there for next week.

• need to produce a plan for tracking 1.8.1 approval queues and setting expectations there appropriately.

Inline Spell Check

Waiting for clarification on licensing.

Instrumentation / Exit Surveys

• Mostly working on server backend. Not much new status to report.
• bug 189570 is fixed on the trunk.

Session Saver

• SessionStore service mostly working in Bon Echo
• Currently pulling from cache or reloading, not dump/restoring DOM
• This week: define and document API, finish code review and post patch

Branding & Update Systems

• nothing new here

RSS

• need to check in with robert sayre

Offline mode / better use of cache

• patch is in, waiting for branch approval
• continuing to investigate low hanging fruit

Anti-Phishing

• fritz, darin, neils, mmc and brakowski meeting this afternoon to talk about ways of bundling/integrating Google phishing protector
• also investigating heuristic-based approaches and UI rendering for warnings about phishing

EULA

• nothing new here

Performance

• schrep's out of town, but is still planning to kick off a meeting on collecting better performance data on daily builds to continually monitor this issue

Other Business

• annie: maybe use Google's QA to help us here
  • action annie and timr to talk about this