Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08

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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

• Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Nightly (13)

• Safebrowsing move from SQLite to flat file landed (bug 673470)

• Telemetry dashboard is now public! See Taras' presentation for access details.

Add-on Builder

• release today
• shooting new tutorial today
• all systems are still GO for launch next Wednesday February 15th

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

• Found a nasty and released 1.4.3
  • Important for developers using simple-prefs, simple-storage, or passwords APIs to take a look at:
  • Blog post explaining issue and fix
  • We wrote a module to help anyone affected "recover"

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

• Spun 1.5RC1 yesterday
• Still on track to release Feb 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

• On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Add-on of the week!

• Andrew Sutherland has written an SDK-based add-on called about:nosy to show "about:memory with charts, helps you lay blame more easily"

UX & User Research

The Mobile Diary project is now in the hands of our users. The project will help us learn more about user attitudes, behaviors, and use cases. If you want to get an in-depth look at user needs, consider attending a participant interview, scheduled in the SF Bay area on Feb 15-16, 18-19, and 21st. Get in touch with Mary Trombley if you're interested.

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

• Google released a beta of Chrome for Android, based on a fork of the Chromium code (version 16.0.915.75). A major focus for the development team is to re-merge the trees; some of the work has been done. Because of the Java base of Android, a lot of work using Java Native Interfaces will have to be done, no doubt to improve device support.

• Chrome for Android also has integrated support for a mobile remote debugger, allowing developers to debug or profile their mobile web pages and web apps using a desktop machine. Here's a screencast demo. Developers are encouraged to ask questions on stackoverflow.com.

• Google announced that Chrome would soon stop conducting SSL online revocation checks, using its existing software processes to distribute lists of revoked certificates.

• The German government, in a general list of recommendations for computer security, recommended the Google Chrome browser, primarily because of its sandbox architecture.

• Development versions of Chrome now feature a new Settings UI that is fluid and appears to make use of graphic acceleration; see the video at the link for a demo.

• The Dev version also now has partial support for Web Intents -- here's a screenshot.

Microsoft

• The IE team's blog posted a detailed summary of the upcoming support of CSS3 3D transforms, with some interesting demos.

• In a related post, the team drew attention to the fact that IE10 embedded in Metro apps will have the same performance, unlike similar apps on iOS, which run more than three times as slow.

• MSIE 10 will offer compressed proxy browsing.

Opera

• The W3C blog posted an interview with two members of the Opera team. They said among other things that Opera Mini's proxy browsing / compression features make it so popular with users in developing regions that carriers use it in their advertising. There's also an interesting summary of their vision for HTML5 on television sets.

Other

• RIM has announced that all the code in their SDK for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform will be open sourced. Code is available at http://blackberry.github.com and development of the HTML5 SDK is happening in the open there.

• There's a proposal at the W3C for the next version of HTML to support accessing image metadata in the DOM.

• Strangeloop Networks released a "State of the Internet" report that indicates that while the average site is 10% faster than it was a year ago, top-ranked sites are getting bigger and slower, with the average home page containing 98 objects.

Mobile

This week we are talking about Chrome for Android beta. Summary below, detailed report in your inbox.

• Yesterday Google launched Chrome for Android beta, as a first step towards making Chrome the standard browser for Android version 4 and above. The release supports Ice Cream Sandwich, ARMv7-based devices, which currently make 1% of the Android install base and account for a 3 million addressable base.

• The browser is based on Chrome v16 and V8 v3.8 and has a multi-process architecture similar to the desktop version. It does not have plug-in support, and lack of Flash in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market. An Android Central poll asking "Is a lack of Flash support on the mobile browser a deal-breaker?" has 47% of Yes answers and 52% of No.

• Its UA String is: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-US; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) CrMo/16.0.912.75 Mobile Safari/535.7)

• Speed, simplicity and personal are its main user propositions, while tab management, user data sync, the Omnibox and its multi-process architecture are the main promoted features. For developers, Chrome comes with a remote debugging via USB feature and boasts Web standards compliance, extensive HTML5 support and hardware acceleration.

• Its positioning speaks to speed, personalization and extension of the desktop. Branding is persistent in the product on the New Tab page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the desktop: friendly, light, easy-going, simple and straight to the point. Tagline is "Your Chrome, away from home."

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Press

• Mozilla's Firefox 10 Muscles Up on Developer Tools
  

• As Firefox 11 Hits Beta, Work Begins on Push Notifications for the Web
  
• Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox
  

• Coming to Firefox: Flash Player in a sandbox
  
• Adobe, Mozilla bring sandboxed Flash plug-in to Firefox
  

• BrowserID takes evolutionary step; ventures into wild