Weekly Engineering Newsletter 2011-05-04
Asa Dotzler
where each week I bring you the absolutely essential engineering content
from all of the various meetings, blogs, IRC, and other channels.
*What You Need to Know Right Now*
The authoritative source for Aurora, Beta, and Release channel
information has arrived in the form a new blog called, yep, you guessed
it, Channels: http://blog.mozilla.com/channels
*Planning Update*
We're half way through the Firefox 6 cycle and in that time we've
resolved 550 bugs by landing 650 changesets from 120 authors into
mozilla-central. GO TEAM!
The merge to Aurora 6.0 will happen on 2011-05-24.
We have created a "trial" Firefox 5 Beta build and are in the process of
bootstrapping the Beta channel with users from older Firefox 4 betas.
This will also give us more testing on the Channel Switching feature
ahead of the merge to Beta. You can read more about this at DevNews:
https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2011/05/04/beta-channel-switcher-testing/
If you've got something you need to bring to the attention of the Aurora
or Beta release teams, this post will tell you precisely how:
http://blog.mozilla.com/channels/2011/05/04/triage-for-channels/
If you are doing work in mozilla-aurora or mozilla-beta, you need to
reclone or update your .hg/hgrc file. You can read all about it:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652229
The Product team is working on the backlog of Feature Pages in the
Inbox. Once they catch up, the plan is to turn those around much faster.
Keep those Feature Pages coming!
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Planning_and_Tracking
(You can stop reading here, but you'll miss some cool stuff.)
*Must Read Blogs & News*
Nicholas Nethercote — A better about:memory: stage 1
http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/05/02/a-better-aboutmemory-stage-1/
Henrik Moltke — Radiolab player demo
http://yoyodyne.cc/radiolab/
Bugzilla Tips — Search Bugzilla Using Google
http://bugzillatips.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/search-bugzilla-using-google/
PC World — Coming Soon: A Faster Firefox for Linux Users
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/226847/coming_soon_a_faster_firefox_for_linux_users.html
*A Few Cool Features & Fixes*
Highlight the domain name in the address bar
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451833
revamp about:memory
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633653
-moz-hyphens and hyphenation dictionary support
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253317
*Meetings I Went To So You Didn't Have To*
Weekly Engineering Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2011-05-03
Weekly Delivery Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2011-05-04
Thrice-Weekly Aurora Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Aurora/2011-05-03
Weekly Beta Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Beta/2011-05-02