Firefox/Planning/2012-01-25

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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.

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Beta (10)

• Add-ons default to compatible is in Firefox 10. Add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4+ will be compatible in Firefox 10.
  • Great work by Unfocused, Wil Clouser, Virgil Dicu

Nightly (12)

• bug 566489: inline autocomplete has landed thanks to efforts from David Dahl and Marco Bonardo. Marco has been fixing followups in an attempt to polish the feature for release, but we may end up disabling it on Aurora to get some extra bake time.
• Snappy (last week's summary)
  • Smooth scrolling has landed (bug 198964)
  • Early preview of about:jank add-on
    • still buggy and requires recent Nightly

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• 1.4 Released two weeks ago - no issues

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• 1.5b2 Released yesterday
• On track to release on Feb. 21st, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• Have made good progress on Talos testing - something to show soon
• Still having discussion of localizing html elements in SDK-based addons - please join in
• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb. 21st, 2012

UX & User Research

The Mobile Diary Project is progressing nicely. We are in the process of recruiting participants to tell us how they use apps and how they use the browser. There will be opportunities for you to meet with these mobile users coming up in mid-February. Email Mary Trombley if you have questions.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Microsoft

• There continue to be persistent rumours that Microsoft is planning to have a unified platform from the OS kernel up for Windows 8, "not just in terms of a common design language and interface (Metro), the same HTML5 Internet Explorer browser and integration with Windows Live and Azure — but also in terms of a common core."

• Other rumours indicate that the next release of Windows 8 will be called a consumer preview, not "beta". Interviews with developers who have recently built apps on the current Developer Preview said, overall, that it is still rough, with plenty of missing functionality, but that they found it possible to build the apps they wanted.

• Microsoft also released an updated version of Compat Inspector that works with the IE10 Preview. This tool allows webmasters to identify changes that are required to better serve IE9 and IE10.

Google

• An interesting blog post details a claim that the primary reason Google decided to create the Chrome browser was to perfect technologies required to better crawl the web, all in an effort to improve search rankings. By citing patent applications, the author makes the claim that "GoogleBot is a browser".

• Google released some advertising videos promoting the automatic translation capabilities of Chrome.

• Recent WebKit / Chrome developments include a screen-size emulation back-end in the Web Inspector tool, which will soon allow for easy emulation of mobile device screens, and the first commits to support the Shadow DOM in Javascript.

• Web RTC is now in Google Chrome's dev channel.

Opera

• Opera's Dragonfly editing tool now features dynamic Javascript value inspection -- hitting shift while clicking on an element will show its value in a tooltip.

Other

• At an upcoming security conference in Vancouver, separate teams of hackers will be competing to win $60,000 to take advantage of recently-patched vulnerabilities in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

• An interesting interview on the W3C blog with the head of the Financial Times' web team on why they decided to abandon their iOS native client application and develop an HTML5 version instead.