Firefox/Planning/2011-10-12

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde Conference Room
• irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
• (the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

Video/Teleconference Details - NEW

• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 95312 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312 (US)
• Vidyo Room: Warp Core
• Vidyo Guest URL

REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren't able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Actions from Last Week

• Daniel to report back on re-repack of SDK-based addons after version number bustage
  • "It's all FIXED!"

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 7)

• Firefox 3.6 → 7.0.1 update has been postponed, still trying to figure out when we are rescheduling. Christian will message at least 1 week before it happens, currently checking with various stakeholders

Beta (8)

• Silent update
  • Landed change for feature Lesson App Update Displayed UI, dialog display timeout changed from 12 to 24 hours. Over 90% of users should no longer see this dialog as part of update.
  • Landed change for releng that allows for hiding the "what's new" page after update. See feature Silent Update whatsnew

Nightly (10)

• Silent update
  • Feature Removal of OS security dialog for Windows scheduled for security review tomorrow (Oct. 13)

Firefox Mobile

Native Android UI is our primary focus

• Mozilla has decided to start working 100% on the native Android UI version of Firefox Mobile
• Firefox Mobile 9 (Aurora) might be the last XUL-based UI
• Many details will be fleshed out at the mobile summit next week.
• Things we are exploring as ways to improve speed and memory usage:
  • Dropping e10s
  • Reworking history and bookmarking
  • Looking into add-ons restructure
  • Looking into L10N affects
• See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI
• See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI/Architecture_Overview

Customer pain points and plans to fix

• Performance: 5% increase in 5-star reviews on android market from v6 to v7 with users noticing the performance improvements. NativeUI is plan to fix most common startup performance issue.
• Flash player: 14% of all reviews for FF7 on the android market request flash player; click-to-play work is in-progress to fix.
• Stability: Users report high memory/resource usage in below-average reviews on android market. NativeUI is plan to fix.

Aurora (9)

• Might be the last XUL based UI release of Firefox Mobile
  • Camera patches for stability
  • Back out locale picker. This was mainly in Fx9 for testing so we could add it to Fx10 for realz.
  • A few performance and regression fixes will likely land

Nightly (10)

• Work on the native UI is starting up
  • Full team is working on it
  • Reviewing architecture
  • Planning tasks
• Some patches still landing on XUL nightly so we can get early testing
  • Flash
  • Platform crash fixes

Firefox Sync

• Firefox 7:
  • A postmortem will be held this week on Sync issues. Will report on that next week.
• Firefox 10+:
  • Improving Sync Set Up - In development
  • Push to Device - In development. You can play with an add-on here.
  • Addon Sync - In development.

Add-on Builder

• SDK-based add-ons that were repacked are able to be downloaded and auto-updated again!
• Release today will push: search improvements, repacker changes, foundations for Jinja/Shipyard MVC overhaul
• New repacker process has been solidified, testing will begin this week for SDK 1.2 repacks of Builder-originated add-ons.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.1 -> Firefox 7)

• No major complaints with the new repack proposal - likely to move ahead with that for the 1.2 release.

Stabilization (1.2 -> Firefox 7, 8)

• Add-on SDK 1.2RC1 was spun up yesterday
• First draft of release notes can be found here
• Unless there are any issues, the RC build is the one we'll release next Tuesday, October 18, as Add-on SDK 1.2.

Development (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• Will Merge the Development branch to Stabilization when 1.2 releases
• Our end-of-year goals are likely to be altered slightly with new mobile UI shift

Feedback Summary

Desktop

7.0.1

• More freezes/hangs/not responding: [1] and dozens more (probably half of our top issues are some flavor of this).
• Users got hijacked with something (or a common page is starting to use) "text enhance".
• Close button binding closing browser rather than tab bug 685225. Not sure why this is getting more attention.
• Exc in ev handl: Error: Bad NPObject as private data! errors are also attributable to VNC plugin.

8.0

• Higher amount of crashes and hangs after updating Flash (10/3) - [2]
• Back/Forward buttons are not working for a small amount of users [3]
• Can't drag tabs to bookmarks bug 680677
  • Some complaints that you can't reorder tabs at all.
• Some third party add-ons aren't being disabled by default in 8.0: bug 693698. Skype: bug 693459

Mobile

see Mobile section above^^

UX & User Research

Usability sessions still happening as planned in Toronto during mobile week.

Presentation on Firefox Design Principles this Thursday at 2pm PST in Mountain View.

Market Insights

Desktop

Updates taking a break during scope revamp; to be coming back soon. Feedback on topics covered the past weeks welcome.

Mobile

Summary below, full update here and in your inbox.

• The announcement of ICS and Nexus Prime was postponed, but plenty of details leaked: the new device will have top specs, LTE and NFC support, 3 hard-coded buttons

• The Android Market suffered an outage for users in China due to technical issues from Google, now fixed

• Opera Mini 6.5 and Opera Mobile 11.5 were released, with focus on data usage and saving

• Amazon Fire pre-ordered 95 000 times in first day after launch, Silk browser vulnerable to privacy concerns

• LTE emerging fast all over the world

• Singapore and Japan lead browser traffic from connected devices (non-computers), UK and US not far behind

Question: what is the trend of unlimited mobile data plans? Answer: the trend is that unlimited mobile data plans are disappearing in the countries that have most of their users on plans, like the US, but most of the world is on prepaid subscriptions, which are by definition tiered.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

• Which Browser Has Your Back? That Would Be Firefox
• Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs On The Fate Of Firefox In A Mobile Era
  

• Releases Annual Report, Surveys The New Era Of Competition
  
• Mozilla: Rising revenue, but rising challenges
  

• Mozilla Plans to Silently Update Future Firefox Releases
  
• Future Firefox to slurp updates silently
  

• Mozilla postpones Firefox 3.6 update plan
  
• Update: Mozilla to prompt Firefox 3.6 users to ride rapid-release train
  

Questions, Comments, FYI

• When do we anticipate we'll do the Firefox 3.6.x → 7.0 upgrade message?
  • Christian said he is figuring it out, will have at least a week notice
• (bsmedberg) I posted to dev.planning about allowing users to upgrade more slowly (LTS for consumers) but didn't get any response. Does that mean I should assume it was rejected, or just not yet considered?

Actions this week

• Jen to come back with postmortem summary for sync issues in FF7
  • Will do this next week since postmortem is this week.