Firefox/Planning/2012-07-25

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
• Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
• Toronto Offices: Finch 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# 99696 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 99696 (US)
• Vidyo Room: ProductCoordination
• 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

Release (14, 10esr)

• Our expectation is that we'll be fully unthrottling the 14.0.1 release today or tomorrow
• FF14.0.1 post-mortem will be held this coming Tuesday at 9AM PT (Warp Core physical, Release Coordination virtual)

Beta (15)

• FF15 beta 1 was released last Thursday
• FF15 beta 2 candidate is now available, will ship before the end of the week

Aurora (16)

• FF16 Aurora was unthrottled (desktop/mobile) last Friday

Firefox Mobile

Beta (15)

• All strings (but 1?) for these features have now landed on Beta
• Honeycomb Flash support will be in FF15 beta 2, released this week - please test on your tablets!

Aurora (16)

• ARMv6 support is now being targeted for FF16, not 15
  • We're building a community of ARMv6 MTD users - please point all of your followers at https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobiletestdrivers-armv6 and https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/aurora/

Add-on SDK

Release (1.8 -> Firefox 13, 14)

Stabilization (1.9 -> Firefox 15, 16)

Development (1.10 -> Firefox 16, 17)

Landing progress:

• loader!

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Top Issues:

Flash

• Flash continues to be one of our top issues. Many users were hoping that 14.0.1 would resolve the issue.

Stability

• Hanging, crashing, not responding and excessive system load. [1]
• There are quite a few reports from these users that the issue was NOT happening in 13 [2].
• Around a 20% increase in mentions of crashes, freezing, or unresponsiveness in 14.0.1 compared to 13.0.1 [3]
• Many indicate that having multiple tabs open is a significant contributor [4]
• Firefox 14.0.1/Bit Defender. Does not happen in 15 Beta. [5][6]

Netflix on Mac

• This is still one of our top issues for the week. [7] [8]
• Reports indicate that even updating Silverlight causes poor performance, jerky playback and sound issues. [9]
• Possible unconfirmed workaround is go to finder-->applications, right click on Firefox, click on "get info", and check the box that says "open in 32-bit mode"
• We have a few users now willing to work with us 1 on 1. Information on this to follow.

Features in 14.0.1:

Click to Play

• Click to play interferes with YouTube fullscreen [10]
• Some concerns with click to play have surfaced in the SUMO community [11]

Favicon

• The removal of Favicons from the awesome bar is receiving generally negative feedback [12]. It is difficult to be precise since the descriptions can vary greatly. Might need to do more focused research.

Native Fullscreen in Mac

• Many users are excited about this update.
• One complaint is that Toolbars do not auto-hide [13]

UX & User Research

• [desktop]
  • [australis] (Zhenshuo)
    • Customization layout mock-up for prototyping
    • Menu Panel overflow/add-ons
    • more here https://etherpad.mozilla.org/AustralisCustomization
  • [project whimsy] exploratory project to add useful and fun information in a subtle/ambient fashion (shorlander)
    • example - some contextual info in new/hometab: oldest, old, new
  • [stub installer] mockups screen flow (martell, madhava)
• [sign into websites] Persona Native UI mockup http://cl.ly/image/3v0s1z3O051A
• [privacy/security] Initial project plan is here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Lco/FX-Privacy-and-Security-Design-I (Larissa)
• [metro] (Yuan)
  • Series of bugs opened on interaction issues
    • bug 774850 : Investigating long swipe to reveal tab panels and URL bar
    • bug 774867: Investigating speed of hiding context UI while scrolling
    • bug 774872: Implementing context UI behaviors while adding a new tab
    • bug 774863: Keyboard behaviors while swiping
    • bug 774352: Align tab opening behaviors with desktop Firefox
• [dev tools] Creating mockups for bug 770818 and Sketching solution for floating panels instead of dock able panels (Brian Dils)
• [Android] (Ian)
  • overview of UI layout for different device sizes and orientations: wirefames in PDF
  • some updates to about:home for tablet flickr set
  • Sync setup flow on tablet flickr set
  • finalizing some edges of reading mode (bug 771380, bug 766942, bug 766948)
  • More work on C2DMA and Feedback Solicitation
• [other]
  • ideation based on Diane's "Find, Organize, Synthesize" research - raw ideas here (PDF) (Diane, Zhenshuo, whole team)
  • exploratory prototype (in-progress) around bookmarks (Chris Lee) https://dl.dropbox.com/u/28610/bookmarks/index.html

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Adobe

• As an indication of the close and strengthening ties between Adobe and the WebKit project, the Adobe Web Platform blog has been added to Planet WebKit

Google

• Google announced that Chrome in Windows 8 Metro mode will support Adobe Flash and its PDF Viewer, using Chrome's Pepper API. The post also provided some statistics on plugin usage collected from 20m Chrome users. 99.9% used Flash per month, and 58% used the PDF Viewer. Only 12% used Java.
• The Pepper API Flash Player plugin has now been turned on by default on Mac OS X in development versions of Chrome
• Drag-and-drop of entire folders now works in Chrome
• Support for playing encrypted WebM files has been added to Chromium, and the Chrome iOS browser now supports the Chrome to Mobile feature
• At the Black Hat conference this week, Trustwave announced that they had successfully evaded Google Play's "Bouncer" security-check system by placing a malicious app into the Android market
• It appears that ChromeOS machines will soon be able to boot Ubuntu Linux, and will support the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi ARM-based systems

Microsoft

• Perhaps as a result of the revelation that Microsoft failed to supply a browser choice screen to customers running Windows 7 SP1, Reuters stated that EU antitrust regulators are investigating Microsoft's rules for third-party browsers in Windows 8. The investigation will also focus on charges that Microsoft allows only MSIE on the Windows RT version that will be available for ARM-based tablets.
• Microsoft released Glimpse, a page-based web catalog Javascript framework. Code is available on their github account.
• An interesting blog post describes the details behind Microsoft's plan to make the Windows 8 Metro platform "hardware-accelerated by default]

Security

• Since criminals have had 70-80 percent successs in recent months in using Java plugin vulnerabilities to take over users' machines, security experts expect significantly more Java-based attacks to arise.

Updates

• Major software companies, including Microsoft and Symantec, kicked off "International Technology Upgrade Week". Skype published the results of a survey which found that nearly half of consumers fail to upgrade software regularly and a quarter don't know why they should

W3C

• The WHATWG and W3C have officially codified their split. Members of the WHATWG, including Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, will continue to create a "living specification" while the W3C will focus on solidifying "snapshots" of it over time. The net effect of this will likely be that web platform innovation will speed up.

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Firefox 15 beta boasts support for Opus audio format, reduces add-on memory leaks [14]

Firefox 15 Will Finally Fix Memory Leaks Caused By Add-Ons [15]

Firefox 15 Beta Tackles Memory Leaks [16]

Firefox 15 beta brings the new Opus audio codec to the forefront [17]