Firefox2/StatusMeetings/2006-03-07

<< previous week | index | next week>>

In Attendance

jhughes, beltzner, dietrich, Axel, gavin, rstrong, bryner, brettw, brianr, pamg, linus, annie, darin, dveditz, timr, scrhep, cbeard

Agenda

1. Alpha 1 Status
2. PRD Update
3. Firefox 2 Feature Status Roundtable
4. Any other business

Alpha 1 Status

Features

• Places infrastructure (performance, stability, toolbar drag & drop)
  • ben is porting bugs over to branch, plan to turn it on by default tomorrow
  • ui is known to be annoying, but internals seem solid enough for a developer preview

• Undo Close Tab
  • pushed to A2?

• Tab Overflow
  • pushed to A2?

• Extension Blacklisting
  • Extension Manager code reviewed. XUL / JavaScript code to be reviewed. Should land soon dependent on it getting reviewed. (mscott in queue to do reviews)
  • going to implement darin's review comments

• Extension Dependencies
  • landed, no regressions

• Search Plugin Format Changeover (with sherlock import)
  • made some Sherlock fixes
  • new patch to be posted today, will need review

• Spell-As-You-Type (english only)
  • we are clear to ship en-US with the product
  • all other dictionaries must be downloaded explicitly as XPIs, mscott maintains a list of these extensions; these are the same dictionaries/problems that OpenOffice has. (cbeard: we can do better! ;-) perhaps we can license or buy dictionaries and release under a compatible license? rebron is going to dive into this. we should continue on the current path regardless.)
  • started porting this to branch, to be finished today or tomorrow
  • shouldn't need that much bake time before we make A1

• Instrumentation Infrastructure
  • code landed on trunk and on branch
  • nothing for it to talk to, still blocked on server-side & storage space
  • in parallel, modifications are made on the client
  • hope to test server by end of the month

• RSS parser
  • SAX parser bug 315826 and dependencies finally got reviewed. Documented and almost ready to land. bug 325080 contains working RSS2/RSS1 parser w/ some Atom support. Need to cover more pathological cases and finish Atom. [-RS]

• RSS content detection (?)
  • landed on trunk and branch
  • there is another piece of work about how to resolve conflicts between multiple sniffers, but that can land in parallel
  • with API there, some UI can be created when we detect that a page is a feed. Robert Sayer is interested in doing this.

Release Issues & Timing

• version number for A1 will be 2.0a1, trunk will be 3.0a1 (see MZ forums post by mscott)
• still have to make the patch to rename trunk/branch
  • trunk will become browser/3.0a1, 1.8_BRANCH will become Bon Echo/2.0a1
• plan is to promote this as developer only release, low-key announce
• need 3-4 days after code complete
  • action: schrep to talk to preed about when we could push an alpha1
  • action: need to test 1.5->2.0 update behaviour (darin to send timr testcases)
    • Axel: is this codepath or UI testing? should l10n be concerned?
    • darin: it's both, so there may indeed be localization concerns
    • rob_strong: remember that right now the check for extension compatibility check only returns extensions that have compatibility updates, not full upgrades
    • cbeard: do we want to have a mirror of AMO to have a better bring-up experience for extensions?
    • rob_strong: let me think about that, but we can probably accomplish the same effect on AMO at the moment.
    • action: rob_strong to co-ordinate with shaver on this
  • action: need to get 1.8 nightly updates for the branch again

• Axel: can we bring up the Alpha for l10n builds? We don't have any trademark policy for the Places yet, and I don't expect the default set of Places to be stable.
  • if we put the file in content, won't it just not be localized?
  • this isn't about localizing for A1, it's about getting this done up front so we don't have a post-mortem on it
  • action: the default file should be moved to content (brettw)
  • ben: this shouldn't block A1

Status Updates

None so far?

Places

• Brett: have seen no new data loss bugs since re-turning on. Startup and PLT are reasonable.
• any other updates?

Tabbed Browsing

• any other updates?

Extension Manager Enhancements

• any other updates?

Installer

• any other updates?

Search Engine UI

• Have made a few important Sherlock fixes
  • tested ~6500 plugins and compared output from the old search service
  • only ~80 differences, some of which are improvements over the old parsing, others are edge cases
• New patch for review today, hoping Ben and mconnor have a chance to look at it soon

Visual/UI Refresh

• started discussion in moz.dev.themes about new theme for Firefox2; surprisingly low response!
• the Chrome changes UI thread in dev.apps.firefox seems to have wound down, will consolidate feedback and review later today and post back on that thread

Platform Uplift

• anything new from last week?

Inline Spell Check

• we are clear to ship en-US with the product
  • all other dictionaries must be downloaded explicitly as XPIs, mscott maintains a list of these extensions; these are the same dictionaries/problems that OpenOffice has.
  • rebron will explore the possibilities, cbeard has suggested that we could look to either license or buy dictionaries for inclusion or release under compatible licenses.

Instrumentation / Exit Surveys

• working on getting machines for server
• lots of progress on server side code
• working on finishing client side tasks
• exit survey web app bug 322884 is still not live. need to poke morgamic.
• as added prior to release bug 322884 still not live. morgamic is poked.

Session Saver

• Patch almost ready, testing now.
• No other news.

Branding & Update Systems

• Still a todo item for Darin. We don't need to do anything special for FF 2.0a1, but it would be nice to get the nightly update channel working again. Preed says it is "midway on the list."

RSS

• biesi's generic content sniffing patch landed on the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH.

Offline mode / better use of cache

• Fixed a regression
• Roc has a patch to observe OS network state on linux. A similar patch exists in bugzilla for windows. Might be worth it to get some of this into FF2.
• Other work remaining: refresh PAC automatically

Anti-Phishing

• bug 329292 filed to track the landing of Google's "Safe Browsing" code on branch
  • to-dos include: opening up to other data providers, anonymizing data stream, creating generic API for other Mozilla products to use, renaming to "anti-phishing" (see comment 26 and comment 28)
• Sherman Dickman to take over this bit from cbeard, and investigate heuristic mechanisms as well as integration of this code from Google

Performance

• done some basic benchmarking and baselineing
• will have update for us next week when he's back in town

Other Business

• any other business?
• I'd like to add Extension Manager UI update to the feature list. This is badly needed to properly support locales, blocklisting, dependencies, and extension update. Robert Strong
• dveditz: we've been seeing malware attacks which are installing malicious extensions or convincing users to do that. I'm not sure that the extension blocklisting is going to work to prevent these malicious extensions, as they can just change their own GUIDs or install to the application directory.
  • the whitelist is equally problematic in that once a known domain is on it, everyone can spoof that domain
  • darin: I was speaking with fritz about this today
  • action: dveditz to pull together a meeting to talk about this (him, rob_strong, security group, drivers, anyone from bon echo that's interested)