Fennec moving to extended support

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

Hello everyone,

tl;dr: Fennec will be following the 68 train to ESR68-based release.

Why are we doing it?

We want to provide users with a secure and supported legacy Firefox for
Android until Fenix has matured enough for users to migrate to it.
Therefore, starting from Gecko 68, we plan to use the ESR68 repository as a
stable base for managing Fennec engineering, testing, and release of builds
going forward.

Will end users notice a difference?

There will be little to no user-visible changes from this change. Users
will continue to receive new releases on the same cadence as before.

What should developers expect?

We specifically chose to make this decision now to take advantage of a new
ESR cycle in order to minimize the overhead such a change entails.
Backports of security fixes and other critical bugs will continue as
expected. This change allows us to continue supporting Fennec for lower
cost while we focus our development resources on GeckoView and Fenix.

Also, in case of unforeseen issues with this plan going forward, we are not
planning to make any breaking changes to Fennec builds and tests on
mozilla-central until after the start of the Gecko 71 cycle. Tests will be
moved to Tier 2 status and run at lower frequency, however.

How long will we support Fennec?

While the ESR68 branch is due to be supported until late 2020, we are not
committing to tying Fennec’s support lifespan to that timeframe. The
decision for if and when to officially EOL Fennec will depend on our
readiness to replace it, which is still TBD.

If you have any questions about this plan, don’t hesitate to reach out and
I will do my best to follow up. Also, a more detailed project plan is
available at the link below:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oRPkwP3l7QzdQYj0Wn7d_3EfTZaakocA_i_pGKlG0dI/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks,

Ryan

[Mike Hommey]

Just skimmed the document, so I might have missed it, but it doesn't
seem to mention it. I assume Fenned will live on the same mercurial
branch as Firefox ESR68 in the mozilla-esr68 repository (presumably,
default) ?

Mike

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

That is correct.

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 3:11 AM Ryan VanderMeulen <rvande...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> If you have any questions about this plan, don’t hesitate to reach out and
> I will do my best to follow up. Also, a more detailed project plan is
> available at the link below:
>

As a nightly Fennec user, I'd much rather start running Fenix nightlies at
some point soon. Is there any tentative ETA when Fenix nightlies will
become available for dogfooding on the Play Store, with regular updates?

As a long-time Mozillian, it's sad that so little information about the
Fenix project (rationale, rough timeline) appears to be publicly available.
At least searching wiki.m.o didn't turn up anything for me. I understand
not wanting to Osborne Firefox for Android or whatever, but surely bringing
along Mozillians like the Nightly community might provide some value.

Regards,

Dirkjan

[Chris Peterson]

On 4/28/2019 12:40 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> As a nightly Fennec user, I'd much rather start running Fenix nightlies at
> some point soon. Is there any tentative ETA when Fenix nightlies will
> become available for dogfooding on the Play Store, with regular updates?

I don't know when Fenix Nightly builds will be available in the Google
Play Store, but Mozilla's Android Components "Reference Browser" does
have Nightly builds in the Play Store. Reference Browser is a good way
to test drive GeckoView performance and compatibility. Fenix reuses a
lot of Gecko and Android code that first lands in the Reference Browser.

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/reference-browser/blob/master/README.md#test-channel-on-google-play-store

chris

[Chris Peterson]

On 4/28/2019 12:40 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:

> As a nightly Fennec user, I'd much rather start running Fenix nightlies at
> some point soon. Is there any tentative ETA when Fenix nightlies will
> become available for dogfooding on the Play Store, with regular updates?

[Ritu Kothari]

+release-drivers <release...@mozilla.org>

On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 3:48 AM Ryan VanderMeulen <rvande...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> > > If you have any questions about this plan, don’t hesitate to reach out
> > and
> > > I will do my best to follow up. Also, a more detailed project plan is
> > > available at the link below:
> > >
> > >
> >

> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oRPkwP3l7QzdQYj0Wn7d_3EfTZaakocA_i_pGKlG0dI/edit?usp=sharing
> >
> > Just skimmed the document, so I might have missed it, but it doesn't
> > seem to mention it. I assume Fenned will live on the same mercurial
> > branch as Firefox ESR68 in the mozilla-esr68 repository (presumably,
> > default) ?
> >
> > Mike
> >

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>

[gbr...@mozilla.com]

Bug 1577037 recently stopped running almost all tests against Fennec in trunk-based (Gecko 71) continuous integration and on try; most of these tests had been running as tier 2 and with reduced frequency for the last several months. Fennec tests continue to run on the esr68 branch and Fennec tests can still be run on try from an esr68 context.

A few Fennec Raptor tests continue to run on trunk at this time since they were not yet available on esr68; I hope those will be moved to esr68 soon.

A full range of tests running against geckoview apps continues to run on emulators (Android 7.0 x86-64) and hardware (Android 7.0 MotoG5, Android 8.0 Pixel2) on all trees.

This seems like a good time to remind ourselves that Fennec is shipped from esr68 now: Any changes required for Fennec need to be applied to esr68.

- Geoff