Firefox/Planning/2011-09-28

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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

• Sheila to come back on bug 687991 -- crashes on alice.it without stack
  • Fixed another bug so we could get the crash reports. Crash only showing in builds from 20110923 or earlier so appears fixed by bug 687768.
• Johnath to ping JB about Thunderbird participation in this meeting
  • Sent mail, they are going to participate, but are going to lurk for a few weeks first (hi tbirders!)
• Johnath to ping Todd about apps participation in this meeting
  • Sent mail...

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Aurora (9)

• We got some really nice capabilities uplifted from m-c to Aurora yesterday. Here's a taste.
  • "Type Inference" giving us up to 44% performance improvements on AWFY
  • Twitter Search
  • "Two-finger swipe for Lion" for back and forward navigation on Mac 10.7 Lion.
  • "New Lion-ized theme for Lion" toolbars, icons, buttons, etc.
  • Tweaks to the Windows theme for Win7 consistency
  • You can now create bookmarks by dragging text URLs to bookmarks toolbar
  • Now you can drag a link from another app and just drop it on Firefox and it will load
  • "Always restore pinned tabs" No matter what the users settings for restoring tabs (or not) the App Tabs should always be restored.
  • "Improve responsiveness of history removals" deleting large numbers of history items from the Library view used to hang the browser forever. now it is much faster.
  • "Add support for fave icons on jump list uri entries" Windows 7 JumpLists, a pretty important windows integration feature, just got a lot better. Right click on Firefox in the taskbar and see the beautiful icon-ified jumplist popup.
  • "should be able to reset a resized textarea" Users can resize text areas in Firefox. If you resize a textarea and then double click on the resizer it will reset to the original dimensions.
  • "Sync should never complain about a network problem anymore unless you the Sync Now menu item/toolbar button is clicked." Sync is getting less noisy with its errors.
  • "Implement font-stretch property" was completed in 9. It's notable because it was filed in 1999 :-)
  • "add mouseenter and mouseleave DOM events" high-profile web devs have been begging for this for a good while.
  • "Implement CSS3 columns shorthand" CSS 3 columns are more important than ever and with IE 10 (and Windows 9) adding support for multi-column layout, we're finally getting there with colums.
  • "Implement CSS3 text-overflow: <left> <right>"
  • "API for controlling fullscreen from content" (still preffed off.)
  • "Implement temporal dimension portion of Media Fragments URI specification for video/audio" This is kind of a huge step for Open Video.

Nightly (10)

• Bug 635645 - consider increasing the amount of scrolling performed by using the arrow keys -- This makes us scroll fast like all the other browsers. Easy win on perceived performance.
• Some nice tweaks to from front-end folks
  • Bug 684450 - Remove stop/go/reload button affordance and streamline other location bar icons
  • Bug 689051 - drop the drop shadow on the back button for Windows 7
  • Bug 632365 - Delay status updates for links further
  • Bug 462117 - Add specialized video controls for small-dimension media.
  • Bug 472942 - VideoDocument should center video in tab

Firefox Mobile

The bigger issues

• Will Java front-end be feasible? Doug T. is driving
• Flash support will land on nightly in the next few days, need to evaluate

7

• Released to Android market
• Ad-Block plus is likely the only major add-on affected by "hidden" add-on issue, no plan (let's discuss) to revert to 6.0.
• Reminder: Key Features in this release
  • Copy & Paste
  • Added a ‘Quit’ action to the Android menu
  • Language detection on first-run
  • Improved image rendering on Tegra-based tablets and phones (see bug 669851)
  • The WebSocket API is now available in Firefox for Android (see bug 537787)

9

• Major tablet UX refresh
• Webapps support
• More locale picker work
• Camera
• Need to make decisions on:
  • Flash on demand (front-end patch getting better)
  • UA
  • Featurettes, like the Clear Private Data changes (need to triage)

Firefox Sync

• Fx7 - Instant Sync
• Beta (8) - Instant Sync - remaining piece
  • Relanded Drop single DeviceInterval to 1 hour. See bug 678588 and crash bug bug 598774 for more info.
• Firefox 10+:
  • Improving Sync Set Up - In development
  • Push to Device - In development. You can play with an add-on here.
  • Addon Sync - In development.

Add-on SDK

Release (1.1 -> Firefox 7)

• 1.0 -> 1.1 repack occurred Monday, September 26
• repack process experienced some problems; they have now been resolved
• repack post-mortem to take place this week or next

Stabilization (1.2 -> Firefox 7, 8)

• second test build, 1.2b2, spun yesterday, Tuesday, September 27 (announcement)
• final release on schedule for Tuesday, October 25, two weeks before Firefox 8
• will probably move up final release one week to Tuesday, October 18, three weeks before Firefox 8 (discussion)

Development (1.3 -> Firefox 8, 9)

• merge to stabilization branch on schedule for Tuesday, October 25
• will probably move up merge and final release one week to ship three weeks before Firefox 9

UX & User Research

Tablet UI exploration (aka usability testing) to take place in Toronto during mobile work week (most likely Oct 18-19th). User research (aka Mary T) is looking for a developer or two to sit in on these sessions.

Market Insights

A fix landed in Chromium to synchronise extension settings.

Amazon announced the Silk Browser for the new Kindle Fire tablet.

Rockmelt announced that they will support Facebook OpenGraph in the Beta product in a few weeks.