WeeklyUpdates/2009-06-29
Friends of the Tree 
Development Updates
Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
- Firefox 3.0.12
- Code frozen as of Thursday last week
- Targeting mid/late-July release
- Firefox 3.0.13
- Proposed schedule on the wiki
- Feedback? Email ss!
Gecko
- We're still done with 1.9.1. Working on the next release. A few focus items:
- Improving overall responsiveness. This not only helps Firefox but helps our mobile efforts.
- Process Separation
- Add more web capabilities. There's several things in video that we'd like to add (looping, playback rate, seekable and buffered time ranges, etc.).
- Improving Cairo and continuing hardware acceleration, etc.
- And, lots, lots, more.
- Static Analysis and Rewriting
- Introducing DXR The most important code navigation tool ever
- David Humphrey's announcement: http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=557
- Taras' blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2009/06/29/dxr-the-most-impressive-code-navigation-tool-ever/
Firefox 3.5
Firefox Front End Work
TB 3
Mobile
IT
- Experiments in IT & Operations Transparency
- Old builds & ftp.mozilla.org
- Working with Metrics on usage analysis
- moz.dev.builds discussion
Release Engineering
- Major update available on FF3.5 release day: just do "Help->CheckForUpdates"!
- Blogpost with details here
- Hunting "intermittent unittest failure"
- run same tests on same build 3 times in a row
- Downtime Tuesday evening (6-10pm PDT)
- rollout of new talos TP4 pageset on mozilla-central.
- reset of tryserver hg repo
- setup of Places branch
QA
Test Execution
- Shipped RC3 to beta users
- Fx3.0.11->Fx3.5rc3 Major Update throttling against betatest
- Completed 100% of Firefox 3.5 feature testplan. results
- Mozmill smoketest automation is ~75% completed. 1 blocking [bug 499782 testcase]
Web Dev Testing
Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
- Last friday, we had a fennec beta testday. Results here
- Had a max of 41 in the testday channel at its
- Major contributors outside mozQA: knotbeerdan, slowtin, tmyoung, lonelybob, kanth_, merike, mmm, atokubi1
- 43 bugs filed (2 crashes and 4 major bugs)
Test Development
- Will release JS library for using Bugzilla RPC API this week (a reusable component that we'll need for QAC redesign)
- Working toward Automatic Crash analysis
- Ran TUnit tests on non-sse machines for release testing
- Tested Fennec Beta releases
- Making progress on Mochitest on WinMobile, still hammering on subprocess.py hacking to move forward
- Jonathan completed the invalidation reftests required for bug 451332
Security
Marketing/PR
Firefox 3.5 Launch
- Help promote Firefox 3.5! We created a summary of all the promotional activities you can help with tomorrow. Please pitch in!
- Help us track online mentions and promotional efforts with our activity tracker.
- Firefox 3.5 Launch Parties: So far we have 106 requests for swag packs from all over the world. Some of the locations include Macedonia, Lithuania, Taiwan and Peru.
- Regional Social Network outreach. We need help updating regional social networks and Mozilla/Firefox groups. Please sign up here if you would like to take on one.
PR
- Fennec releases in the press - PC Magazine, Product Reviews, The Register, Gizmodo
- Fennec and Android coverage in ReadWriteWeb and CNET
- Firefox 3.5 coverage in Beta News, Technology Review, Financial Times, ComputerWorld, PC Mag, InfoWorld
- History of Firefox development in CNET
Mozilla Service Week
- Kicking off l10n efforts -- focused on Spanish, French and German for first round. Looking to push sites live by July 13th.
Events
- Renegade Craft Festival, July 18 - 19, 2009, San Francisco - Opportunity to garner awareness for Personas and to get new ones created. Also a great place to expose add-ons. Sign-ups to work at the festival are on the wiki.
- Maker Faire Africa August 14 - 16, 2009, Accra, Ghana - Looking to sponsor the event and bring together the local L10n community. Check out the wiki for early details.
General
- New Spread Firefox Affiliates Campaign: Upgrade the Web
- Dynamic Buttons with browser specific messaging encouraging people to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.
- Campaign Supported with a Word Press Plug-in and Google Gadget Ads.
Support
- Please help our users during the Firefox 3.5 release!
- ...or, please help the SUMO community help our users!
- Anchor Live Chat shifts (talk to zzxc in #sumo)
- Just be available in #sumo on irc.mozilla.org to answer questions SUMO contributors might have while they're troubleshooting a support issue
- Result of A/B test of new SUMO start page
- SUMO 1.2 released last week after a heroic struggle by webdev, IT, and SUMO teams
- We now have an automated metrics dashboard! Expect to see a blog post about this shortly.
Metrics
- There are currently issues with market share data from Net Applications. We're working with them and hope that they have those issues resolve before this Wednesday (July 1st), which is when June’s market share numbers would typically be reported.
- SUMO & Analytics:
- We published findings from the recent A/B test at support.mozilla.com. The new page design looks like a big win for Firefox users. Posts from both Blog of Metrics and the Firefox Support Blog.
- We launched a mechanism on the SUMO home page, allowing users to provide us with feedback. Please see the button in the lower right hand corner of the page. Many more details to come!
Evangelism
- Mozilla Developer Center
- Continuing development of custom plugins for MDC to adjust certain behaviors on the site, and to add features. More details soon.
- Keeping in touch with MindTouch on their plans for their next release, due mid-summer, to ensure that some of our requests are handled.
- Working on content clean-up not specific to any given release.
Labs
Developer Tools
Add-ons
- Big thanks to everyone who saw us at FISL and especially to community members who helped out at the booths and presentations
- Compatibility up to 83% for Fx 3.5
- Thanks to heroic efforts from Rey and the add-ons team, the pending and nominated queues are down to a third of where they were at the beginning of the weekend.
Webdev
- SUMO - shipped 1.2 last Thursday
- Data warehouse/metrics dashboard shipped, watch for blog once metrics set up by admin.
- Kampyle survey now operating in inproduct help bug 496967
- Completed A/B tests on home page (blog)
- Built and staged v1 of API for Developer Tools site
L10n
L10n team last week spent a good amount of time setting goals. Focus in Q3 will be on experimentation with l20n, refining our web documentation, working on Verbatim and Silme, and continuing progress on the dashboard.
Firefox 3.5
- Shipping Firefox 3.5 in 75 languages
- This includes 2 version for Japanese users (ja-JP-mac and ja), but does not include en-US
Web
- Lots of QA on websites done by Delphine in the Paris office, with Pascal's guidance
- Mozilla Europe pages finishing up for Firefox 3.5 launch
- All other in-product pages here: Mozilla web dashboard
Tools
- Axel attended Open Translation Tools conference in Amsterdam
- Public sessions on l20n and meetups with tool developers
- The thought arose that we need to do a conference where tool developers meet with localizers to address what tools *should* do for localizers
Foundation Updates
- Mark has been representing Mozilla at FISL in Brazil and has posted slides for his Mozilla Education talk.
- Mark also published a wrap-up of the Open Video Conference.
- We continue to prepare for the relaunch of www.mozilla.org:
- Files on the staging server are being tweaked
- Current site editors should be aware of the upcoming transition to Subversion
- Archiving has reduced the number of files from roughly 24,000 to 14,000
- Pages are being updated to tell more of the Mozilla story
- The public discussion about improving Bugzilla is winding down and Gerv will be working on following up the issues raised on the newsgroup thread and wiki page.
- We're continuing to work with new Mozilla Education partners and plan new projects:
- Tomorrow (July 1) Universidad Rey Juan Carlos will be starting its Mozilla technologies course.
- This October the University of Evry will be having a "Course on Mozilla Education and Technologies @ Evry" (CoMETe) at the University of Evry; for more information see the slide presentation.
- A university in India is planning to add a Mozilla/open source course as a formal elective; more news on this later.