Weekly Status Report, W40/2012

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 40/2012 (October 1 - 7, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  More talk and driving to move B2G crash reporting forward on multiple fronts: crash annotations, content crash reporting, UX implementation, about:crashes.
  Started following bugs on making B2G use less memory, which reduces the probability of out-of-memory crashes.
  Tracking stability of Firefox 16 for desktop and Android in preparation of the release.
  Following the progress and fix to the large crash issue we had on CyanogenMod 10.
  Tried to push for a fix for wrong daily crash numbers for Android on Socorro.
  Switched arewestableyet.com dashboard to displaying Flash crashes and hangs per 100 ADU.
  As usual, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed, and made sure my custom reports keep working well.
• German L10n:
  Reviewed Firefox for Android 17 L10n, some fixes for de as well as a first German Firefox OS L10n.
  Updated suite and core L10n on trunk in preparation of the uplift to Aurora.
  Updated the German dictionary add-ons to be installable without a Firefox restart and incorporate the newest upstream dictionary files.
• Web Apps:
  Added OpenGeoServer Aerial layer to Lantea Maps, corrected the copyright notices for multiple layers, and added DOM full screen support to that app.
• Themes:
  Put some finishing touches on the 2.13 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek, matching the Mozilla 16 train, and uploaded those. They're waiting for AMO approval now.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  OMTC for Linux, icon sizes on Gaia, Flash stability, Vidyo stability, Italy workshop, etc.

It's probably quite visible in my updates that B2G / Firefox OS has become a much larger focus in my work recently, as it's moving from a feature work into a performance improvement and stabilization phase. The crash reporting UX is probably right at the borderline of that, as it's technically feature work, but needed as a large help for improving stability. I'm also testing the system a lot, with the default apps including the browser as well as my own apps, most importantly Lantea Maps, where it find it most annoying that I currently cannot save anything from the app to a file on the phone, so though I can record GPS tracks, I need to throw them away afterwards. I'll need to find a solution there.
That said, the system is shaping up nicely for a first edition geared towards a low-end smartphone market. I hope it will be successful in that setting, as it will only show its full power once we have that step behind us and can move to devices with more resources in addition to the low-end ones.