Mozilla Project Weekly Status: November 16, 2009

ADDONS.MOZILLA.ORG (AMO)

FIREFOX

  • Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6
    • slushy code freeze for both releases
    • still have a couple of patches to take
    • otherwise, on track for mid-December release

  • Namoroka (Firefox 3.6)
    • beta 3 refresh should be coming Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning
    • beta 3 includes a components directory lockdown feature – johnath to blog about the details early this week
    • code freeze for RC1 is scheduled for Wednesday but might be at risk; come to the Platform meeting tomorrow to discuss.
  • Firefox 3.7

    • preliminary explorations on 3.7 work continue, see the projects page for more details.

GECKO

  • Gecko 1.9.2
    • News from the CrashKill front:
      • Today’s discussion will be about how to determine if 3.6 will crash less than 3.5.x and 3.0.x. The way we do our crash report throttling makes comparing releases difficult–we have to guess on about five different variables when comparing releases.
      • Reminder: We now have the ability to block specific DLLs from loading. For the list of DLLs we intend to block, see bug 525103.
    • News from Electrolysis:
      • 4 blockers until out-of-process-plugins (OOPP) land in mozilla-central preffed off, hopefully this week… lots of small issues being found, but few major ones.
      • Firefox 3.7 to have OOPP enabled by default, Windows and Linux. There will be no multi-process tabs, nor mac support.
      • demo of Fennec with multi-process tabs available: beginning additional work to make it less hacky
    • GFX:
      • Hardware-accelerated rendering has been on everyone’s mind.
        • The Layers API has been pretty much finalized, and Robert O’Callahan and Bas Schouten have been looking into what will be necessary to implement it. Please take a look and see if the Layers API fits your needs!
        • Bas Schouten continues to tear things up. His mostly-complete DirectWrite font backend, bug 517642 has been enhanced with a new Direct2D cairo backend, bug 527707. Direct2D will be our first mainstream hardware accelerated backend.
      • WOFF, the Web font format pioneered by Mozilla, has been a big hit. John Daggett and Jonathan Kew attended ATypI 2009 in Mexico City to talk about it and other font-related developments, and John has a blog post about their presentation.
      • Also on the subject of fonts: Jonathan Kew and Behdad Esfahbod have been working on Harfbuzz, an advanced OpenType font shaper. Most recently, they spent a week in Toronto sprinting on the library, which we’re going to use for more consistent and performant font shaping on all platforms. You can learn more in bug 449292 or in Behdad’s blog post.
      • Jeff Muizelaar has been working on creating a scrolling performance test suite which the Graphics team wants to use to measure and improve Gecko’s interactive scrolling performance. If you know of any sites that are slow to scroll, please tell us in bug 527728.
    • Blockers:
      • P1: 4
      • P2: 50
      • P3: 0
      • Other: 28
    • Team blocker numbers:
      • Layout: 7
      • Content: 8
      • GFX: 6
      • JS: 31

THUNDERBIRD

  • TBird 3.0RC1 (Shredder)
    • No Report

Complete Meeting Notes