Firefox/Planning/2013-04-17

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Planning Meeting Details

• Wednesdays - 11:00am PT, 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.

Actions from Last Week

• Unlikely, since last week's meeting was cancelled!

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 20 General 4.1/5 stars

TLDR: Most users are quite happy with FF 20. There are intermittent reports of slowness, perf, and addon issues.

Positive:

• No other browser this week has allowed me to log in to my college campus so I could work online to complete my assignments other than Firefox.Firefox is the ONLY BROWSER That Works for me!! :) Thank you..
• It's simplicity - no distractions or flashy messages on the front page, and it's so easy and fast to use
• I like it better than google. It seems faster and lists places to go on the bottom that I don't have to type them in. Keep up the good work.
• i don't know much about computers but i have been using Firefox for at least six years and find it to be the best for me, its fast and easy to use and for me its just right/ thank you Firefox

Negative:

• takes lot of RAM. I expect FF to load pretty fast with a very low mem requirements.
• I like every thing about Firefox except crashes a lot. I like the new features, I can tell it is getting faster and the crashes seem to happen less.

Private browsing: 4.0/5 stars

TLDR: Used regularly 58% of the time, rarely/never 42% of the time. Still a lot of confusion over what it does but almost everyone says positive things.

Positives:

• I used Chrome for private navigation and Firefox for day to day stuff.
• Finally i will be able to dump Chrome for good! Hoorray!
• I like that that now the private browsing function opens up another window leaving the original in tact. In general it looks and feels great, not sure really how helpful i can be.
• LOVE THIS FEATURE

Some (minor) pushback:

• You have changed things at the bottom of tools, and over in File you put in a New Private Window. I liked tools just the way it was and did not know that you were going to make this drastic change. I have been trying to back to version 18 or 19 to get tools back the way it was. I would be happy if you could put me back to tools the way it was. Enough said..........
• I am still on the fence about the changes to "Private browsing". I think I might have preferred the all or none approach before. I don't understand the reason for the change, but can live with it.

Download Manager: 3.8/5 stars

TLDR: Mostly positive. The negatives are from users that either didn't see a reason to change the feature or just have suggestions for improving the Download Manager.

Postive:

• I like it, because it makes it easier than having a separate window just for downloads.
• Its much easier to use...thank you
• its about time you guys changed it. the new one is absolutely brilliant!
• Keep on doing what you're doing. If I can understand it, anybody can. Thx Firefox ;-)

Negative:

• I didn't see anything wrong with the way it was.
• Did it NEED to be changed?
• May just have to get used to it. Old ways sometimes die hard :)

Feature Suggestions:

• There needs to be a button to quickly clear the recently downloaded files, not just through the "Show all downloads" window.
• I'd like it more if you added a pause/resume button to the left of the open containing folder button
• It only shows bar & remaining, I will very much love it if it will show the download speed in first click.

Market Insights from the Product Marketing Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

Canonical

• Canonical, some press analysts say, is doing well at encouraging independent developers to port their Android applications to the Ubuntun Mobile platform.

Google

• Google forked WebKit creating a new engine called Blink. While Google is able to remove "7 build systems, more than 7,000 files and 4.5 million lines", the WebKit community is also cleaning house.
  • Over the last year, Google contributors made around half of commits to WebKit, so the WebKit community is now in the process of reprioritizing and identifying code areas that are now unmaintained. Significant portions of the WebKit codebase that require new owners include the Web Inspector, File System API and CSS Variables.
  • Google posted a video where lead developers answer community questions about Blink. Google says they "have no plans" to change the format of the user agent string.
  • Opera has confirmed that it will use Blink. Yandex's browser will as well.
  • Google's Alex Russell blogged about how it will allow the Chrome web platform development team to iterate faster. Justin Schuh described the security features that will likely be coming.
• Chrome 27 Beta was released. Web content appears 5% faster, the Chromium team now uses benchmarks from webpagetest.org in their testing, a "simple, elegant user interface" for month, week, and date <input> types, live, low-latency audio support for the Web Audio API, the Sync FileSystem API for Chrome Apps, and other improvements.
• Chrome now has a regularly-updated, detailed, feature dashboard for web platform work.
• Chrome for Android now syncs passwords and autofill entries for logged-in users.
• In likely effort to better support emerging markets with poorer bandwidth, select videos on YouTube are now available at a 144p pixel video resolution
• Google acquired Behavio, a startup that uses mobile sensors to collect data and predict user behavior. Funf.org is an open-source version of the approach.
• Google is about to place a "Chrome Apps" bookmark in every Chrome user's bookmark bar.
• ChromeOS is getting a virtual keyboard, no doubt part of the early steps for having the operating system run on tablets.
• Chrome Beta for Android and Chrome for iPhone and iPad now support full screen browsing. Chrome Beta for Android also features improved handling of search terms in the URL bar, and reporting on the data savings obtained from the browser's new SPDY-based data compression feature.
• Chrome for Business can now be centrally configured by administrators, and be configured to revert to another browser for specific in-house applications

RockMelt

• RockMelt has removed their RockMelt browser from the market, deciding to concentrate on their web curation product.

Microsoft

• Microsoft released another attack in its "Scroogled" campaign, describing how the Google Play store passes users' personal information to app developers.