Duration: 10 minutes This is a weekly status meeting, every Wednesday, that helps coordinate the shipping of our products (across 4 release channels) in order...

https://air.mozilla.org/product-coordination-meeting-20150520/

Watch mconley livehack on Firefox Desktop bugs!

https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-mconley-livehacks-on-firefox-episode-15/

Last week I wrote some notes about re-triggering jobs to find a root cause.  This week I decided to look at the orange factor email of the top 10 bugs and see how I could help.  Looking at each of the 10 bugs, I had 3 worth investigating and 7 I ignored.

Investigate:

• Bug 1163911 – test_viewport_resize.html – new test which was added 15 revisions back from the first instance in the bug.  The sheriffs had already worked to get this test disabled prior to my results coming in!
  
• Bug 1081925 – browser_popup_blocker.js – previous test in the directory was modified to work in e10s 4 revisions back from the first instance reported in the bug, causing this to fail
  
• Bug 1118277 – browser_popup_blocker.js (different symptom, same test pattern and root cause as bug 1081925)

Ignore:

• Bug 1073442 – Intermittent command timed out; might not be code related and >30 days of history.
• Bug 1096302 – test_collapse.html | Test timed out. >30 days of history.
• Bug 1151786 – testOfflinePage. >30 days of history. (and a patch exists).
• Bug 1145199 – browser_referrer_open_link_in_private.js. >30 days of history.
• Bug 1073761 – test_value_storage.html. >30 days of history.
• Bug 1161537 – test_dev_mode_activity.html. resolved (a result from the previous bisection experiment).
• Bug 1153454 – browser_tabfocus.js. >30 days of history.
  

Looking at the bugs of interest, I jumped right in in retriggering.  This time around I did 20 retriggers for the original changeset, then went back to 30 revisions (every 5th) doing the same thing.  Effectively this was doing 20 retriggers for the 0, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, and 30th revisions in the history list (140 retriggers).

I ran into issues doing this, specifically on Bug 1073761.  The reason why is that for about 7 revisions in history the windows 8 builds failed!  Luckily the builds finished enough to get a binary+tests package so we could run tests, but mozci didn’t understand that the build was available.  That required some manual retriggering.  Actually a few cases on both retriggers were actual build failures which resulted in having to manually pick a different revision to retrigger on.  This was fairly easy to then run my tool again and fill in the 4 missing revisions using slightly different mozci parameters.

This was a bit frustrating as there was a lot of manual digging and retriggering due to build failures.  Luckily 2 of the top 10 bugs are the same root cause and we figured it out.  Including irc chatter and this blog post, I have roughly 3 hours invested into this experiment.

https://elvis314.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/re-triggering-for-a-root-cause-version-1-57/

As all the release of this special 38.0.5 cycle, we took mostly patches for the Pocket integration, some reader view improvements and stability fixes.

The next version should be 38.0.5 rc1 (go to build Thursday, go live Friday).

• 21 changesets
• 38 files changed
• 393 insertions
• 132 deletions

List of changesets:

http://release.mozilla.org/statistics/38_0/2015/05/20/fx-38.0.5b2-to-38.0.5b3.html

Keeping Firefox zippy involves running performance tests on each push to make sure we’re not making Firefox slower.

How does that even work? This used to be a mystery. NO LONGER. jmaher lets you peek behind the curtain here in the first episode of Lost in Data!

http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2015/05/19/lost-in-data/

If you’ve been watching my tweetstream recently, you know that The Recompiler (@recompilermag), a magazine about technology, is in the final days hours of it’s inaugural subscription drive.

Yesterday, Audrey announced that we’re going create a podcast version of The Recompiler!

Some of you may have listened to In Beta, which I co-hosted last year. Doing that podcast was great fun and I’m so looking forward to hosting this supplement to The Recompiler. The podcast will enhance the written version of the magazine with tech news, criticism & commentary plus interviews with our authors.

If you’re craving awesome, insightful conversation on technical topics from fresh, less-heard-from voices, then The Recompiler podcast is for you!

Get involved and support The Recompiler today by purchasing a subscription and look for the first written issue and episode this summer!

http://subfictional.com/2015/05/19/the-recompiler-now-with-more-podcast/

I started contributing to Mozilla nearly 11 years ago, in 2004, and joined as a full-time employee over 8 years ago. Suffice it to say, Mozilla has been a big part of my life in a lot of ways. I’ve dedicated essentially my entire career so far to Mozilla, and it introduced me to my wife, just to name a couple.

Mozilla’s in a great place now – still a tough challenge ahead, but plenty of great people willing and able to tackle it. Firefox has new leadership, the team is being re-organized and groups merged together in what I think are the right ways, and I’m optimistic about their prospects. But it’s time for me to move on and find The Next Thing – that I have no idea what it is now is both exciting and a little bit terrifying, but I feel good about it.

It will probably take me a while to figure out what exactly a post-Mozilla Gavin-life looks like, given the various ways Mozilla’s been injected into my life. I won’t disappear entirely, certainly, and I know the many relationships I’ve built through Mozilla will continue to be a huge part of my life.

I’m looking forward to what’s next!

http://www.gavinsharp.com/blog/2015/05/19/leaving-mozilla/

Mozilla Advocacy — Our 2015 Plan for Protecting and Advancing the Open Web

Advocacy is a relatively new area of focus for Mozilla. Our increased emphasis on advocacy is born out of the recognition that, like code, public policy has an impact on the shape and health of the open web — and that a vital force protecting the web will be the millions of people who consider themselves to be citizens of the web.

Over the next few weeks, the Mozilla Advocacy team — including Andrea Wood, Director of Digital Advocacy and Fundraising; Melissa Romaine, Advocacy Manager; Chris Riley, Head of Public Policy; Stacy Martin, Senior Manager of Privacy and Engagement; Jochai Ben-Avie, Internet Policy Manager; and, Alina Hua, Senior Data Privacy Manager —  will lay out our latest thinking about how we’re developing public policy and creating advocacy initiatives.

Our goal with Mozilla Advocacy is to advance the Mozilla mission by empowering people to create measurable changes in public policy to protect the Internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Our three strategies to achieve this goal are:

1. Leadership Development — Grow a global cadre of leaders — activists, technologists, policy experts — who advance the free and open web.

2. Community — Assist, grow, and enable the wider policy & advocacy community.

3. Grassroots Advocacy — Run issue-based campaigns to grow mainstream engagement with Mozilla and open web issues.

Each of these strategies ties directly to the goal of empowering people. Yet, as we execute there are still open questions that need input and more thought from the community. For instance, how can we create better scale and participation, recognizing that real impact happens when the community is empowered to take action on policy and advocacy initiatives. A key to this is making our own policy positions and advocacy efforts easier for people to understand and engage with.

We need you to play an active role. Because the web is growing in markets where we are not experts, the Mozilla community will play a central role in scaling efforts to protect the open web throughout the world. We invite you to help shape our thinking by reading the 2015 Policy & Advocacy Plan and offering input through this thread in the Mozilla Advocacy Community.

–Dave Steer, Director of Advocacy, Mozilla

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2015/05/19/mozilla-advocacy-2015-plan/

The judges have selected their three favorite designs for a new AMO t-shirt, and now it’s your turn to tell us which one you’d like to see printed. The shirts will be sent to add-on developers as a thank-you gift, so choose wisely!

The deadline to vote is Tuesday, June 2.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/19/which-t-shirt-design-is-your-favorite/

Bug 1144127 was checked in. This means that starting in Firefox 40, placing add-ons in the distribution/bundles directory will no longer work.

For many years I recommended distribution/bundles as the best place for enterprises to deploy non bootstrapped extensions. It allowed them to make their extensions a part of core Firefox and prevent users from removing them. Unfortunately adware/spyware folks started using this method as well, so we lost this ability. (This is why we can't have nice things.)

So what does this mean going forward?

• You will no longer be able to disable safe mode. You can set the environment variable MOZ_DISABLE_SAFE_MODE_KEY to prevent using the startup shortcut or set MOZ_DISABLE_AUTO_SAFE_MODE to prevent crashes from starting safe mode, but a user will always be able to start Firefox in safe mode from the command line.
• It's much more difficult for you to prevent a user from disabling any extensions you need to add for your company. You'll probably need to do something evil like hide them inside of the add-ons manager. You can contact me if you need code to do that.
• AutoConfig now becomes the preferred method of doing pretty much any Firefox configuration (since you can't place a custom extension into the distribution/bundles directory).

I'm actively working on making the CCK2 work without the distribution directory. The latest beta is here. Obviously some features will be lost st first. I hope to bring as many back as I can. It should be ready by the end of the week I hope.

As a side note, this means that many of my blog posts will have incorrect information. I'm still trying to figure out how to solve that going forward.

https://mike.kaply.com/2015/05/19/distributionbundles-directory-gone-in-firefox-40/

In my last post I shared a tool for playing with the numbers that matter for growing a product or service. (I.e. Conversion, retention and referral rates).

This video of a talk by Brian Balfour is a perfect introduction / guide to watch if you’re also playing with that tool. In particular, the graphs from 1:46 onwards.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adamlofting/blog/~3/Ob2XngebIzE/

Reuni'on bi-semanal para hablar sobre el estado de Mozilla, la comunidad y sus proyectos. Bi-weekly meeting to talk (in Spanish) about Mozilla status, community and...

https://air.mozilla.org/martes-mozilleros-20150519/

Sitting in the lovely conference hotel Estherea in Amsterdam, I am ready to go to Schipol to fly back home to London. This marks the end of the massive conference tour in beggining May. I can’t believe it all worked out, although I had to re-book one flight and I stayed for two days at each location.

(sketch from my Beyond Tellerand keynote by Manuel Ortiz)

Here’s what happened:

• 05-06/05/2015 Windows 10 Summit, Mountain View – you can see all the recordings of the talks at Channel 9 and my “Advancing JavaScript without breaking the web“. My big “wow” moments here were Aaron Gustafson’s “Falling in love with forms” (lots of great, pragmatic advice) and the amazing “Microsoft Edge: Product And Personality” by Paula Chuchro – her excitement for every detail was intoxicating.
• 09-10/05/2015 Open Source Conference Albania – The slides of my opening keynote discussing the current state of open source and mistakes made are on Slideshare.
• 11-12/05/2015 Beyond Tellerand, Duesseldorf, Germany. Slides of my opening talk at day two: Advancing the web without breaking it
• 13-14/05/201 JSDay Italy – opening keynote: Breaking out of the endless callback loop.
• 15/05/2015 DevIT Thessaloniki – Opening Keynote: Crack, Train, Fix, Release – Keynote at DevIT Thessaloniki 2015
• 18/05/2015 PhoneGap Day, Amsterdam – moderated the conference and ran Q&A.

Now it is time to wash my clothes, send all the emails I stacked up during bad connectivity times and clean out my flat to move to another one. Oh yeah, and two more conferences this month :)

http://christianheilmann.com/2015/05/19/may-tour-i-did-it/

This dot release contains some important fixes impacting a lartge number of users. For more information => the release notes.

• 6 changesets
• 14 files changed
• 136 insertions
• 18 deletions

List of changesets:

http://release.mozilla.org/statistics/38/2015/05/19/fx-38-38.0.1.html

For this first beta of this special cycle, we took two kind of changes: * the Pocket feature * stability fixes

• 59 changesets
• 226 files changed
• 12063 insertions
• 919 deletions

List of changesets:

http://release.mozilla.org/statistics/38_0/2015/05/19/fx-38-38.0.5b1.html

Mostly a Pocket's change beta release.

• 23 changesets
• 45 files changed
• 549 insertions
• 136 deletions

List of changesets:

http://release.mozilla.org/statistics/38_0/2015/05/19/fx-38.0.5b1-38.0.5b2.html

Over the past two weeks, Trevor, Alex and I worked on 64-bit support for Firefox on Windows. I am pleased to announce that we were successful, and that Win-64 versions of Firefox Nightly builds should now work with screen readers. So if you have a 64-bit edition of Windows 7, 8.x or 10 Preview, and run NVDA, JAWS, Window-Eyes or other screen readers that support Firefox, you should be able to uninstall the 32-bitz version of Firefox Nightly if you have it installed, and download and run the 64-bit installer from the above linked page.

It is expected that everything works as in the 32-bit version. If, for some reason, you find oddities, we do want to know about them ASAP. We plan to backport support to Firefox Dev Edition (currently at version 40), and maybe 39 beta, but the latter is not certain yet.

So if you use Nightly anyway, and would like to help, we definitely appreciate you switching over to the 64 bit edition and give us feedback! Thanks!

https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/05/19/accessibility-in-64-bit-versions-of-firefox-for-windows/

the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:

• [1146770] implement comment preview
• [1116118] 003safesys.t shouldn’t compile all files by default
• [1163326] implement dirty select tracking in bug-modal to address firefox refresh issue
• [1160430] Add the ability to deactivate keywords
• [1164863] checksetup.pl is unable to run if File::Slurp is missing
• [908387] product/component searching should sort hits on product/component name before hits on descriptions
• [1165741] query.cgi’s Component list should be sorted case-independent
• [1165464] Incorrect link used for firefox help
• [1162334] email_enabled value inverted in User.update RPC call
• [1165917] support tbplbot@gmail.com and treeherder@bots.tld as the tbpl/treeheder bot name

discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.

https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/happy-bmo-push-day-141/

Announcement Marks Key Point in Development of Open Source Mobile Ecosystem

San Francisco, Calif. – May 18, 2015: – The Open Web Device Compliance Review Board (CRB), in conjunction with its members ALCATEL ONE TOUCH, Deutsche Telekom, Mozilla, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Telef'onica, has announced the first handsets to be certified by the CRB. The CRB is an independently operated organization designed to promote the success of the open Web device ecosystem by encouraging API compliance as well as ensuring competitive performance.

The two devices are the Alcatel ONETOUCH Fire C and the Alcatel ONETOUCH Fire E. ALCATEL ONETOUCH has also authorized a CRB lab.

The certification process involves OEMs applying to the CRB for their device to be certified. CRB’s authorized labs test the device for open web APIs and key performance benchmarks. CRB’s subject matter experts review the results and validate against CRB stipulated benchmarks with a reference device to ensure compatibility and performance across key use cases. The two ALCATEL ONETOUCH devices passed the CRB authorized test lab procedure and met all CRB certification requirements.

The process is open to all device vendors whether they are a member of CRB or not. The CRB website www.openwebdevice.org will publish the process for applying for certification.

CRB certification testing is conducted by industry labs authorized by the CRB, with each submission expected to be completed within approximately three days. The CRB offers a platform for the rest of the industry to request certification.

“As an initial founding member of the CRB, we are pleased to know that the Board has achieved one of its major objectives in certifying Firefox OS devices on a standard set of Web APIs and performance metrics,” said Jason Bremner, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We expect other companies will also certify, improving their product development cycle time while ensuring a compelling user experience and compliance to standard Web APIs.”

“As one of the partners of the CRB and owners of these certified devices, ALCATEL ONETOUCH is excited to witness the solid progress and achievements made by all members,” said Alain Lejeune, Senior Vice President, ALCATEL ONETOUCH. “In the coming year, ALCATEL ONETOUCH will continue to contribute to the CRB and establishment of the Firefox OS ecosystem. This news is not only an honor for us but will inspire more Firefox OS partners to strive for certification.”

“In the last three years Mozilla has proven with Firefox OS that open Web technology is a strong, viable platform for mobile,” said Andreas Gal, Chief Technology Officer, Mozilla. “Certification by the CRB provides a launch pad for those who complete to prove that their device offers a consistent and excellent experience for users, reducing time and cost to qualify across operators and markets. Today’s announcement paves the way for other device makers to reach this milestone.”

“TELEF'ONICA supports the opportunities that an open Web ecosystem delivers to mobile consumers,” said Francisco Montalvo, Head of Group Devices Unit at TELEF'ONICA S.A.. “Having CRB as a product certification scheme helps all the partners guarantee that rich Web content is delivered to certified devices with the right level of quality. We are glad to collaborate on this effort.”

“Deutsche Telekom is pleased to be a close partner with Mozilla, Qualcomm, Telefonica, and ALCATEL ONETOUCH among others in the development of the Firefox OS,” said Louis Schreier, Vice President of Telekom Innovation Laboratories’ Silicon Valley Innovation Center. “As one of the founding members of the CRB, our goal in focusing on API compliance and performance is to establish a uniform set of requirements, test and acceptance criteria, enabling uniform and independent testing by accredited labs.”

For more information about the Open Web Device Compliance Review Board, please visit https://openwebdevice.org.

About the CRB
The Open Web Device Compliance Review Board (CRB) is an independently operated organization designed to promote the success of the open Web device ecosystem. It is a partnership between operators, device OEMs, silicon vendors and test solution providers to define and evolve a process to encourage API compatibility and competitive performance for devices. Standards are based on Mozilla’s principles of user privacy and control.

Media Contact: press@mozilla.com

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/05/18/open-web-device-compliance-review-board-certifies-first-handsets-2/

Announcement Marks Key Point in Development of Open Source Mobile Ecosystem

San Francisco, Calif. – May 18, 2015: – The Open Web Device Compliance Review Board (CRB), in conjunction with its members ALCATEL ONE TOUCH, Deutsche Telekom, Mozilla, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Telef'onica, has announced the first handsets to be certified by the CRB. The CRB is an independently operated organization designed to promote the success of the open Web device ecosystem by encouraging API compliance as well as ensuring competitive performance.

The two devices are the Alcatel ONETOUCH Fire C and the Alcatel ONETOUCH Fire E. ALCATEL ONETOUCH has also authorized a CRB lab.

The certification process involves OEMs applying to the CRB for their device to be certified. CRB’s authorized labs test the device for open web APIs and key performance benchmarks. CRB’s subject matter experts review the results and validate against CRB stipulated benchmarks with a reference device to ensure compatibility and performance across key use cases. The two ALCATEL ONETOUCH devices passed the CRB authorized test lab procedure and met all CRB certification requirements.

The process is open to all device vendors whether they are a member of CRB or not. The CRB website will publish the process for applying for certification for their devices.

CRB certification testing will be conducted by industry labs authorized by the CRB, with each submission expected to be completed within approximately three days. The CRB offers a platform for the rest of the industry to request certification.

“As an initial founding member of the CRB, we are pleased to know that the Board has achieved one of its major objectives in certifying Firefox OS devices on a standard set of Web APIs and performance metrics,” said Jason Bremner, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We expect other companies will also certify, improving their product development cycle time while ensuring a compelling user experience and compliance to standard Web APIs.”

“As one of the partners of the CRB and owners of these certified devices, ALCATEL ONETOUCH is excited to witness the solid progress and achievements made by all members,” said Alain Lejeune, Senior Vice President, ALCATEL ONETOUCH. “In the coming year, ALCATEL ONETOUCH will continue to contribute to the CRB and establishment of the Firefox OS ecosystem. This news is not only an honor for us but will inspire more Firefox OS partners to strive for certification.”

“In the last three years Mozilla has proven with Firefox OS that open Web technology is a strong, viable platform for mobile,” said Andreas Gal, Chief Technology Officer, Mozilla. “Certification by the CRB provides a launch pad for those who complete to prove that their device offers a consistent and excellent experience for users, reducing time and cost to qualify across operators and markets. Today’s announcement paves the way for other device makers to reach this milestone.”

“TELEF'ONICA supports the opportunities that an open Web ecosystem delivers to mobile consumers,” said Francisco Montalvo, Head of Group Devices Unit at TELEF'ONICA S.A.. “Having CRB as a product certification scheme helps all the partners guarantee that rich Web content is delivered to certified devices with the right level of quality. We are glad to collaborate on this effort.”

“Deutsche Telekom is pleased to be a close partner with Mozilla, Qualcomm, Telefonica, and ALCATEL ONETOUCH among others in the development of the Firefox OS,” said Louis Schreier, Vice President of Telekom Innovation Laboratories’ Silicon Valley Innovation Center. “As one of the founding members of the CRB, our goal in focusing on API compliance and performance is to establish a uniform set of requirements, test and acceptance criteria, enabling uniform and independent testing by accredited labs.”

For more information about the Open Web Device Compliance Review Board, please visit https://openwebdevice.org.

About the Open Web Device Compliance Review Board
The Open Web Device Compliance Review Board (CRB) is an independently operated organization designed to promote the success of the open Web device ecosystem. It is a partnership between operators, device OEMs, silicon vendors and test solution providers to define and evolve a process to encourage API compatibility and competitive performance for devices. Standards are based on Mozilla’s principles of user privacy and control.

Media Contact:
press@mozilla.com

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/05/18/open-web-device-compliance-review-board-certifies-first-handsets/