Weekly Status Report, W20/2012

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 20/2012 (May 14 - 20, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Lots of discussions around blocklisting old Java versions, we'll go for an extra soft approach as a first step due to the high usage of Flash.
  Following an error of Adobe that we found out about, there was an interesting couple of Flash reprocessing events that we needed and I pushed through.
  As we shipped our first beta of the new Firefox for Android, I helped a lot in monitoring and looking into the crashes we are seeing there.
  On the weekend, pinged people on a heavily explosive Nightly crasher introduced by JS code landed on Friday. People were responsive even on a Sunday to look into the issue, review and land a fix.
  Stayed involved in the discussion for Java signature improvements.
  Reworked my Flash and explosiveness reports to fetch their data from the Socorro database instead of the CSV files.
  Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• German L10n:
  I synched up a few strings in core and DOMi L10n to trunk again.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  SeaMonkey build system work and website infrastructure problems, Android XUL Fennec display problems, stability work week planning, plans for moving merge/uplift day, HTML forms and mobile, web apps on Linux, HTML5 Mario prototype, etc.

The new Firefox for Android is in Beta now, and for phones it's a really huge step, it launches faster than most other apps, and still has all the Firefox power on websites - even including Flash. Yes, we needed to sacrifice our "webby" technologies for UI design to get there, but we'll go even farther with those on our future phone OS.

If you have an Android phone, help testing this beta (that is, if it has an ARMv7 processor, we're still working on a version for ARMv6). We know about a couple of crashes, but we need more reported, including steps to reproduce if possible, to get this one to be as stable as one would expect from a browser baring the "Firefox" brand. Everything we catch now in beta and we can fix here, will not hit the masses when we go to release.

That said, I hear it's pretty good already (I don't have an Android phone by choice, wanted something even more open), so you can feel good about trusting it with your everyday browsing tasks on your Android phone. And at the same time, you'll be doing good by testing it and - in case you crash it - by sending a report we can then look at and fix!