Hey everyone,

We discussed the pros and cons of adding a Beta to the Firefox 3  
schedule at last week's development [1] and product delivery [2]  
meetings, and then had a follow up call with representatives from the  
build, QA, and development teams to review the commentary and  
discussion and come back with a proposal.

// Proposal

After that discussion, the decision was to propose that we add a third  
beta milestone for Firefox 3.1, as well as a requirement that by  
Thursday, December 4th, all component owners re-triage their blocker  
lists in order to identify which require beta exposure, and also to  
develop estimates for driving those lists to zero. From here forward  
we will focus on blocker numbers at our weekly meetings, requiring  
component leads to present plans for reducing the numbers over time to  
ensure we're trending in the right direction. We believe that we can  
add this milestone without a major impact on the shipping schedule for  
the release.

// Rationale

We don't have full clarity into the nature of our remaining blockers,  
some of which likely require beta exposure. In order to close this  
release, a re-triaging (like we did around Firefox 3 Beta 4) is  
required both to identify the severity of the remaining blockers and  
the time required to address them properly. Further, the impact of  
late Beta 2 landings such as Private Browsing Mode, Worker Threads,  
Speculative Parsing and TraceMonkey will benefit from multiple beta  
releases.

The insertion of another beta also offers another public consultation  
point for web and add-on developers, allowing us to react to their  
feedback. Again, with wide-reaching changes like those listed above,  
it was felt that this was prudent, especially if it could be done  
without major impact to schedule.

Finally, as mentioned during the meetings last week, since we will be  
holding off from any additional changes that would affect themers and  
add-on developers, this gives our add-ons community a full beta cycle  
to test and update their add-ons. The hope is that when Beta 3 is  
released, compatibility with our existing add-ons will be high,  
encouraging more users to shift to the beta to provide their usage  
feedback.

// Process

* Only patches for blocker bugs and those with explicit approval will  
be accepted into the Gecko 1.9.1 / Firefox 3.1 codebase (initially to  
be on the mozilla-central repository, soon to be branched to the  
mozilla-1.9.1 repository).

* Component leads will re-triage their blocking bugs marking those  
requiring Beta exposure as "P1", and those required for release as  
"P2"; any other priority will imply that the blocker is a significant  
issue but one which should only get attention if the P1s and P2s  
aren't being actively worked. This is to be completed by Thursday,  
December 4th.

* Regular triage meetings will be held to process outstanding blocker  
nominations and approval requests. At the weekly development meetings  
the blocker fix rates and acceptance rates will be presented &  
discussed to ensure we keep an eye on progress.

* No new features will be accepted into Beta 3. Limited string changes  
will be accepted. No add-on compatibility changes will be accepted.

* Beta 3 code freeze will be scheduled based on the results of the  
triage, but is expected to be in early January 2009.

// Discussion

Please discuss the aspects of this proposal on this thread (follow-up  
to dev.planning). We will also discuss it during today's development  
meeting at 11am PST (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2008-11-25  
for details).

cheers,
mike

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2008-11-18
[2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/StatusMeetings/2008-11-19