WeeklyUpdates/2009-08-31

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Friends of the Tree

Five people, Stuart, Tony, Clint, Tim, and Aakash all wrote in to nominate Joel Maher as a Friend of the Tree for his great work over the last 2-3 weeks

• Handled and drove Beta 3 maemo AND winmo a3 release testing
• Created a test harness to run mochitests on winmo
• Created first test harness to run reftest, crashtest, xpcshell on winmo
• Driving the log compare effort to get known failures factored out of tinderbox output for maemo tunit reports so that we can have a system that we can use going forward to maintain detailed information about our testing on Fennec and even Firefox going forward.
• verified 140+ Fennec bugs last week alone
• leading charge to debug known failures for maemo fennec on tunit
• Mentoring QAE folks on how to test Fennec, aiding with Fennec testday

And I (Asa) would like to nominate David Tran for all his help this summer in improving the experience of streaming content to Air Mozilla.

Development Updates

Firefox

Firefox Front End Work

• review our list of active projects and this quarter's goals
• last week's team progress reports are available on Planet Firefox, which will get prettier in time

Namoroka

• next milestone: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1

Team News

• no more interns, boo-hoo

Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x

• Firefox 3.0.14 / Firefox 3.5.3
  • QA is wrapping up cycle
  • hoping to go to beta tomorrow
  • on track for release next week

• Firefox 3.0.15 / Firefox 3.5.4
  • please work on your blockers
  • code freeze set for September 22 at 11:59pm
  • targeting mid-late October release

TB 3

Bearing down on 3.0b4:

• Slushy Code Freeze: Monday 7th Sept 23:59 PDT.
• Full String Freeze: Wed 9th Sept 23:59 PDT.
• Code Freeze: Friday 11th Sept 23:59 PDT.
• l10n Complete: Monday 14th Sept 23:59 PDT.
• Release builds start: Tues 15th Sept.

IT

Last Week

• VeriSign EV cert for addons.mozilla.org (08/25/2009) bug 503040
• Added Layer42 as a transit provider in San Jose.
• Added multi-state flags
  • status1.9.2 bug 512539
  • blocking1.9.3 bug 510664

This Week

• The Amsterdam Reboot
  • Turned down sites last week. Did we break anything yet?
  • Derek & Arzhel in transit Tuesday, onsite Wednesday

Release Engineering

• Fx3.5.3/3.0.14 ETA to beta, 9/1
  • there will be a refreshed major update (MU) offered between these
• some improvements on the nightly update situation:
  • Armen has landed code to prioritize en-US update generation ahead of l10n updates.
  • we've switched l10n nightly builds to be triggered immediately after the en-US nightly rather than at a set time (7am). This means we'll get l10n nightlies earlier for each platform, and the update generation machine won't be swamped with a huge batch of updates each morning at 7am PDT.

QA

Test Execution

• Fx3.5.3/3.0.14 ETA to beta, 9/1
• Winmo Alpha 3 testing in progress, 2 blocker bugs remain: bug 511535, bug 513520
• Iterating the list and contacts on the Firefox 3.6 Testplan
• Investigating crash reports
• Automating of manual litmus tests progress: Smoketests 88%, BFTs 20%

Web Dev Testing

• Shipped AMO 5.0.9
  • It was a beast, at 116 bugs
  • This release included the run of over 100 Litmus testcases
• Helped in the relaunch of Mozilla.org
• Finished testing SFx 3.0.4 changes, and wrote News & Events and Campus Reps testcases
• Small testing of AMO in China (for a CDN)

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• Community:
  • Testday on Fx3.5 Session Store Testing using QA Companion! is this Friday, Sept 4th
  • Next German Open Source Community Meetup is on September 25. See new blog post.
  • Helped es-MX contributor. See bug 512553.
• Accessibility: Reviewed of provided feedback on these bugs. Provided ports and updates to patches for these: bug 499816 and bug 504053. Evaluated both the Yahoo! RichText editor and the CKEditor WYSIWYG editors for web applications to advise on their accessibility.
• Metrics:
  • Filed a bug on the MAKE rules of security component bug 512341 to allow instrumenting the code base. Provided the solution as well!
  • Mac OS Firefox instrumentation is a success.
  • Investigating the mochitest-browser-chrome test harness hang issue. Seems to be caused by memory leak while switching between private browsing and regular browsing in the harness testing.
  • Started a new usage based code coverage project
  • Mac OS X86 coverage Report

Test Development

• Have a full run of Reftests over HTTP for Tegra, will put failures into bugs this week.
• Beginning work with Electrolysis team to work on test harnesses for electrolysis. Our first priority will be testing Out of Process Plugins.
• Working with Dmandelin to use his python harness for JS Shell testing
• Released the first release of QAC For Mobile
• Pushed Mozmill 1.2.1
• Nearing completion for the log comparison tool to help get the Fennec Test Tree Green
• More details here.

Security

• No updates

Marketing/PR

PR

• Nokia N900 launched with Mozilla-based browser
• Open source's impact on MSFT in CNET
• Why People Don’t Upgrade Their Browser post in Beta News
• Snowl featured in Linux Magazine
• Lifehacker's Five Features We Want to See in Firefox

Mozilla Service Week

• Overall update:
  • Pledge hours are over 6,000!
  • Focus for the coming weeks is on awareness and growing organic events.
    • Created video to help promote
  • Featured on Case Foundation home page!
• Wondering how you can be a part of Mozilla Service Week?
  • Join a local sprint
  • Stay tuned for "challenges":
    • Internet Health Check
    • Web Support at Cafes
    • Social Media seminars
• We're still going global!
  • SQ, PL & KO going live this week

Events

• Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre en Chile October 7 - 9, 2009, Santiago, Chile - Sponsoring event and bringing together the Mozilla Hispanic Community. + 2 day MozCamp Prior.
• WordCamp Philippines September 19, 2009 in Makati City, Philippines - We are sponsoring this event.  Our mission is to help build up the Philippine community and build the Tagalog locale.
• Philippine Blog Awards October 9, 2009 in Luzon, Philippines - We are sponsoring this event.  Our mission is to help build up the Philippine community and build the Tagalog locale.

Community

Product

• Currently working on a solution to help our users understand what Plug-ins are and how to update them.
  • Three phase project:
    • 3.5.3 What's New Page (embedded Flash plug-in detector)(Bug 512483-FIXED)
    • Plug-In Updater Page for end of Sept (detects all users plug-ins and shows users how to update vulnerable ones) Website/Sprints/PluginProblem#Plug-In_Problem (bug 391433, bug 512787)
    • In product plug-in updater (similar to Add-Ons updater) for 3.6

Support

• One-day sprint to write crash articles for the knowledge base on Thursday September 3
  • Goal is to document the most common crash signatures in Firefox so that they all have a Knowledge Base article explaining the cause of the crash and the way to fix it (and any other info that is relevant).
  • See blog post and list of crash signatures (still being worked on) for more info

Metrics

• We're currently implementing a solution that will allow us to easily do optimization testing on Mozilla web sites (e.g., mozilla.com, addons.mozilla.org, support.mozilla.com, etc.). We'll soon be talking more about goals/objectives and planning (and eventually, findings/impact).

Evangelism

• Firefox 3.6 documentation is progressing. Don't forget to tag relevant bugs with the dev-doc-needed keyword so we can find them while looking for the next thing to write about!

Labs

• Snowl 0.3pre3 has been released. It's the last preview release before 0.3. It includes some new features and some bug fixes. More info is available in the blog post.

• Weave 0.6! OMG Weave 0.6! It is released. It has major performance improvements, new better UI on the about:weave page, and better Fennec support.

Add-ons

• Lots of new stuff in 5.0.9
  • Collections Phase II
    • Add-on recommendations
    • Collection based statistics
    • Rating for collections
  • Public Stats Dashboard
  • Contributions on search results, home page, and category pages
  • Post-install "Meet the Developer" pages now available via the Developer Tools
• Next release (5.1!) is 9/24, will be focused on the Developer Hub
• Join us in Miami on 9/15 or Chicago on 9/29 for our Add-ons meetups

Webdev

• Built web pages and applications for other groups.
• AMO 5.0.9 launched last Thursday. Read about it.
• Making progress on the plugins front. Adding warning to whatsnew page on mozilla.com (see screenshot) and creating a plugin campaign.
• SUMO 1.3 goes out Thursday (foundations for Fennec support)

L10n

• Verbatim Alpha launched
• Jeremy Hiatt intern finished with a presentation to platform on l20n. Blog posts here.
• Lots of work ahead on Mobile l10n for the client application and web content

Foundation Updates

• Mark posted extensively on Drumbeat, an initiative to engage huge numbers of people as promoters and stewards of the open web.
  • This is likely major MoFo priority for 2010. Feedback and involvement highly encouraged.
  • A wiki and google group have also been put up to support Drumbeat conversations.

• Thank you to everyone who helped with the relaunch of www.mozilla.org

• The second Mozilla Service Week action template is up: Digital Marketing.
• Please have a look at the first template Internet health and help us by testing it before service week.

Roundtable

Intern Show & Tell

Eric Hergenrader (metrics) and Anthony Hughes (QA) will be doing their presentation on Thursday, at 2pm PST in the common area.