I wanted to shared publicly the projects and areas of focus that the
Firefox Desktop Platform team in Q1.
*Video quality issues, especially Flash video:* We have market data
which indicates that one of the most important pain points for Firefox
users is problems with video. We have several projects across Mozilla to
help improve this, including MSE so that youtube can stop using Flash,
and implementing video fallback in Shumway instead of in Flash for
common video sites. In specific, my goal is to reduce by half the number
of users who experience plugin hangs/deadlocks, which are currently very
common on Windows.
*e10s:* the focus of our team in particular will be making sure that
e10s performs well and has proper measurement systems. This includes
updating telemetry to work with e10s, Talos metrics, and other
e10s-specific quality metrics. We will use these metrics to prepare a
recommendation for e10s riding the trains to beta and then release.
*Telemetry/FHR Unification: *This will combine FHR and telemetry back
into a single client/server measurement system similar to the current
telemetry session-based measurement infrastructure. This involves both
client and server work on our team, and is being done along with the
services engineering team who will be maintaining the data ingestion
infrastructure and the metrics team who uses the data for analysis. This
will ride the Firefox 38 train.
*Update Orphaning: *We currently have too many users stuck on old
versions of Firefox. This quarter we will be making a concerted effort
to measure the reasons that users get stuck on old versions and
implement fixes. Our current orphaning rate is 2% of users per 6-week
release cycle, and by the end of the year we intend for this to be below
0.5%.
*Catastrophic Memory Usage: *Some Firefox users especially on Windows
are experiencing huge memory usage and common OOM crashes. This is not
common to all users, but appears to affect particular configurations.
Our goal last quarter which carries into this year is to diagnose the
most common causes of this problem and work with the appropriate
engineering teams to solve the problems. Currently this effort focuses
on data from crash-stats, but it appears that it may be necessary to add
specific measurement of these problems to telemetry in order to properly
understand the issues.
Questions or comments welcome.
--BDS
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