Weekly Engineering Newsletter 2011-06-08
Asa Dotzler
every Wednesday I bring you the most important engineering information
from all of the meetings you carefully avoided being sucked into, all of
the blog posts you didn’t get around to reading, and any other
happenings that impact Mozilla’s engineering organization.
*Planning Update*
In the last week, we’ve taken 20 more changesets into the [Firefox 5]
Beta, including half a dozen crash fixes, several security improvements,
and the removal of the channel changing UI.
Today we completed what we hope is the final Beta build. It’ll be QA’d
and delivered to our Beta channel audience soon, and if no other major
issues are found by those groups, this changeset will be delivered to
our nearly half a billion Release channel users.
The release date is still June 21st.
The [Firefox 6] Aurora channel is cranking along at a pretty good pace,
though evaluations of tracking nominations and patch approvals are at
tad bit slower than we’d like this weeks thanks to some attention we
diverted to [Firefox 5] Beta. But with just about a month to go before
Aurora is uplifted to Beta, we should be OK with this small delay.
Aurora has seen about 30 changesets in this last week, including the
removal of the channel switcher and the backout of a not ready for
primetime layout improvement from
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10209
There’s been a lot of activity on [Firefox 7] mozilla-central in the
last week, almost 300 changesets resulting in about 120 resolved bugs.
This brings the total for mozilla-central up to about 650 changesets
yielding 450 new features and fixes. Not bad for 1/3rd of the way
through the cycle.
*Must Read Blogs & News*
Products Team — Questions for you (about the new feature page proposal)…
http://blog.mozilla.com/products/2011/06/07/questions-for-you-about-the-new-feature-page-proposal/
hacks.mozilla.org — Dev Derby – a monthly competition of demos using
open technologies
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/06/dev-derby-a-monthly-competition-of-demos-using-open-technologies/
Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Making your add-ons compatible with Firefox 5 and 6
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/06/07/making-compatible-with-firefox-5-and-6/
Chris Leary — Mapping the monkeysphere
http://blog.cdleary.com/2011/06/mapping-the-monkeysphere/
Laura Mesa — Mark Up : Beautiful Collaboration for the Open Web
http://livetolaugh85.blogspot.com/2011/05/mark-up-beautiful-collaboration-for.html
Last but not least, the Channels blog at
http://blog.mozilla.com/channels/ is *always* worth reading.
*A Few Cool Features & Fixes*
Geoff Lankow implemented a very nice mechanism for add-ons to have their
own set of basic preferences in the Add-ons Manger. Great work, Geoff!
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653637
Some folks have been complaining about fonts on Windows since we moved
to DirectWrite and there are fixes landed and landing soon which should
improve this situation by letting certain fonts under certain
circumstances fall back to the old GDI rendering. You can read all about
this at the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661471
For those of you on Mac who wondered why command+click but not
right-click worked to bring up the context menu on Google Maps, Mehdi
Mulani fixed that for ya.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426643
*Meetings I Went To So You Didn’t Have To*
Weekly Firefox/Gecko Development Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2011-06-07
Weekly Product Planning Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2011-06-08
Thrice-Weekly Aurora Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Aurora/2011-06-02
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Aurora/2011-06-07
Beta Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Beta/2011-06-06