Weekly Status Report, W18/2012

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 18/2012 (April 30 - May 6, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Had tons of discussions, wrote an initial spec for Rapid Betas on Socorro and handled some questions that came up on it.
  This also brought up availability of old graph data, for which I filed a bug.
  Some more poking about the top Firefox 14+ crasher, which ended up in a backout of the cause in Aurora, so we only need to get an actual fix in Nightly 15 now.
  Blogged about The Life Cycle of a Crash.
  Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Ongoing datacenter moves, HTML L10n, getting de L10n ready for Fennec Beta, padlock and favicon, WebAPI security discussions, Persona marketing, stability work week planning etc.

I spent a lot of time this last week at a local FLOSS event called "Linuxwochen", which was coupled with Linux Graphics Meeting (LGM) and BSDDay this time. There, I talked to a lot of people, representing Mozilla (after all, I'm the local Mozilla Rep, and I guess I was the only core Mozillian there - was there any other?) and trying to tell people about all the cool stuff we are doing while at the same time helping them with questions and trying to remotely diagnose why some could have memory and responsiveness problems with Firefox (which is still the largest complaint and a persistent image problem).

It would have been really helpful to have a B2G demo device to show them how capable such a system is, as the reaction was quite split when I mentioned that system - one group cheered, another frowned. A lot of reasons for the frowns are those you expect from that crowd we had there - finding that JS is a bad language (if one at all), that JS should be disabled as much as possible and apps would undermine that by not running without JS, or even the mindset that web technologies should stay restricted to a low-privilege canvas withing a heavy browser UI. I tried to, but it's hard to convince anyone with one of those opinions that we'd be on the right track by pushing web apps. The cheers were mostly for the the very open stack or simply noting that we're absolutely spot-on that this is where things are moving anyhow and Mozilla as a player with the mission we have is important there.

I also could convince at least one LGM attendee of switching to Fennec (Beta) on his Android tablet, saying it's by far the best browser he's seen on a tablet so far (yay for Gecko being fast on complex Slashdot pages he used as test cases) and make him cheer even more for me telling that the native builds coming up will improve speed even more, mostly in terms of UI. I'm convinced a couple of people I talked to will try native Fennec once it's in the store, I got at least one to also take a look at its Nightly version.

All in all, a lot of interesting conversation, I learned a lot of what people are thinking about us, communicated a lot of what's happening in Mozilla, and had a lot of fun with developers from Austria and around the world. After those days, I got back to the routine of work somewhat tired, but satisfied.