Firefox 3.1 development state

Proposed beta 2 shedule

Note: This shedule is subject to change. But shows already when to expect the release.

tree closed / frozen	November 4th
en-US builds generated	November 10th
l10n builds generated	November 11th
results QA tests	November 20th
release targeted	November 21th

Testplans state:

Testplan completion %:	86.30% (last week: 86.30%)
Estimated testcases:	748 (last week: 748)
Testcase completion %:	59.05% (last week: 59.05%)

Various bug fixes and recently added features
Bug 463938 - Fix smooth downscaling for images on Linux


Bug 464329 - Land private browsing icons

Bug 463929 - Support 8-bit WAV streams

Last week WAV support was added, like suggested by the HTML 5 spec. Then 8-bit WAV streams weren't supported. This is now fixed and 8-bit WAV streams should now work.

Bug 463692 - Clear the findbar text when leaving the private browsing mode

Back to basics: Update

We are now 4 weeks after Openmoko announced the 'back to basics' plan. After one week they had all of us fooled. Most of us thought Openmoko hadn't done a thing. But a day later they gave us a rather long list of things they had done. After 2 weeks they even got a real name, the 'Optimization' team. In the 3th week some nice optimizations were made. And so we are at the 4th week.

What's on the menu?
Openmoko has planned a release before the end of this month. They want to surprise us with the release of Om2008.11. This release will most likely contain all the work done by the 'Optimization' team so far. You can find the list of bugs that they want to smoothen out here.

For that reason the 'Optimization' team will not begin new and huge tasks but will smoothen all the work already done. And do some minor bugs. So the testing team can begin testing the new release. So it's solid when it is released.

At which bugs will the Optimization team look?

• #69 speed up system initialization: Olv will merge his improvement into testing repo next week.
• #1489 sometimes volume is too low during a call: Tick will implement a volume control in qtopia dialer.
• #2031 scroll list implementation: Tick will improve etk_scroll_list to fit our designer's idea.
• #2113 suspend time come up right after you change the time: Jeremy will look into this.
  

Official status report

Mozilla firefox 3.0.4 is available

The 3.0.4 release is only a security release, so no new features are added. This release is only for fixing security issues and important bugs found after the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0.

The changelog looks like this:

- Fixed several security issues.
- Fixed several stability issues.
- Official releases for the Icelandic and Thai languages are now available.
- Beta releases for the Bulgarian, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian, Occitan, and Welsh languages are available for testing.
- Updated the internal Public Suffix list.
- Fixed an issue where the IME input tool used to enter Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters was covered by the "Add Bookmark" panel. (bug 433340)
- Enabled additional EV root certificates. (bug 451305)
- Fixed an issue where some passwords saved using Firefox 3.0.2 did not work properly. (bug 457358)
- In some cases, Firefox would not properly save proxy settings for protocols other than HTTP. (bug 446536)

download here

Back to basics: Update

We are now 3 weeks (and a few days) after Openmoko announced the 'back to basics' plan. Let's look at the changes.

After one week they had all of us fooled. Most of us thought Openmoko hadn't done a thing. But a day later they gave us a rather long list of things they had done. After 2 weeks they even got a real name, the 'Optimization' team. Now the third week,

What are the main things they did?

• The boot time of a bare image (without any GSM stack) is reduced from 50 to 30 seconds. That was done by replacing the well known U-Boot by Qi. Qi is a boot loader developed by Openmoko with the focus to do just booting. It was developed, because u-boot was getting to big. It wanted to support everything and it began to look more on a kernel. Qi has focused to leave everything (except the booting) to the kernel. Even initializing the screen is considered the duty of the kernel. So a boot menu isn't included. You can do multi-boot by the times you press the power-button. It's not yet advised for replacing U-boot with Qi, because you will not be able to use dfu-util anymore.
  
• They also looked into reducing the network registering time at the Qtopia stack (The GSM stack that is used in Om 2008.9). They have been able to reduce it by 32 seconds. There are no images yet, but it will be merged in the future.
• Also the suspend/resume issues still get attention. They looked into various bugs, like #1991, #1347. The first bug is when you try to resume, it will stay a black screen. The later is when you try to resume, it immediate suspends again without any reason. For the first one, they have to do a little more debugging. For the latter, they found a fix, but they are looking into a better fix. Btw. There are patches for #1884. That's the bug, when you push the power-button just after suspending, it will do a double suspend. It will be submitted very soon.
• They also worked on their python loader for faster booting python applications. They could already reduce the load time of the pyhon sudoku from 2.59s to 1.38s.
  

Official status report

Porting Android, Phase 4: Done

Sean McNeil is still actively porting the Android to the Neo FreeRunner. Today there were new images. For a getting started manual, look in my previous blogpost.

In short

1. Make compatible Linux kernel (done)
   
2. Replace ARMv5 specific code (done)
3. Create images (done)
   
4. Replace hardware specific code (done)
   - SMS (done)
   - Calling (done)
   - Wifi (in progress)
   - GPS (done)
   - Bluetooth (done)
   - Accelerators (done)
   
5. Adding additional software, like on-screen keyboard
   

In depth
Most of the devices are already working in the first image that Sean McNeil has posted. Though Bluetooth wasn't fully patched in the images, because Sean forgot to apply one patch. So it didn't work. With the new images (That you can find on the same location as the previous), Bluetooth works magically. In the new image is Wifi still not working in all situations and can be unstable.

The biggest improvement in the new image is the screen redraws. Sometimes you could see the redraws, for example when you opened the 'Shutdown menu'. That has now been solved by implementing 'Page flipping' for the Glamo.

What's next?
By looking at the porting strategy above, you will see that we just need one thing. W'e need a working on-screen keyboard, before we can fully use the Android. To bad for us, Sean will not start to make something like that. There are 2 reasons for that.

Firstly Google has announced they would make an input device management system with an onscreen keyboard in the first quarter of 2009. Secondly it isn't that easy for making a onscreen keyboard. At the moment there are no java bindings for letting a program insert keystrokes to other programs (Due to security constraints). So if you make an onscreen keyboard, you would have to change every program to work with your onscreen keyboard.

So what's next?
There is still plenty to do:

• Optimizing the code and all the patches. (And sending upstream)
  
• Making a way to accept incoming calls. (On the HTC G1, there is a accept call button)
• Let suspend work reliable

Firefox 3.1 development state

The code freeze is active now. That means the code will not be changed in favor of adding features. The developers then start to build the browser for the upcoming developer release. The estimated release date is now one day later too. For the coming week, it will be almost only polishing to get a robust and solid developer release.

Proposed beta 2 shedule

Note: This shedule is subject to change. But shows already when to expect the release.

tree closed / frozen	November 4th
en-US builds generated	November 10th
l10n builds generated	November 11th
results QA tests	November 20th
release targeted	November 21th

Testplans state:

The Testcase completion is already above the level (50%) it had to be for the beta 2 release. Testplan completion is coming a bit behind, because it didn't reached 100% yet. Probably it will not reach it too, before release.

Testplan completion %	86.30% (last week: 76,52%)
Estimated testcases:	748 (last week: 762)
Testcase completion %:	59.05% (last week: 59.05%)

Various bug fixes and recently added features

Bug 453440 - Extend "Clear Private Data" dialog with time period option

Just like in chrome it is now possible to remove Private Data from the last hour, the last 2 hours, the last 4 hours, the last day or just everything.

Bug 428096 - Make clipboard and drag-and-drop import and export HTML on Mac.

This makes it possible to paste HTML into rich text editing widget and to copy HTML from the browser to programs supporting HTML.

Bug 449315 - Support WAV format in <audio> element.

Following the HTML5 spec the <audio>-tag should support WAV-files. This implements this, only 8-bit samples aren't implemented.

Bug 461891 - switch to using v2.2 safebrowsing servers.

The differences between the v2.1 and v2.2 aren't that big. So this bug only adds the ability to have empty add chunk as a way to fill in gaps in the chunk list.

Bug 17612 - view-source link-browsing

This bug adds the functionallity to click on links in the source-code of a page. That way it will be very easy to view the source and follow the stylesheets or javascripts that are in different pages. Normally it should already be in Firefox, but it isn't possible in the last nighlty yet.

Bug 449307 - Support duration attribute on media elements
Bug 462916 - Update liboggplay to pick up ability to compute Ogg duration

This bugs adds properties of duration, bufferedBytes, bufferingRate, and totalBytes for the <video>-tag. The big problem was the duration, because it isn't easable readable in the file. Normally it should be given in the header as X-content-duration, but that is mostly not the cause. Therefor it was needed to peek to the end of the file, to know the end timestamp. Now therefor the server need the ability to get only the last part of the file. As last it is also possible to read the file-size and estimate the length of the video

Getting started with Android on Neo FreeRunner

Getting ready for Android

• The sd-card: The android want a sd card placed into the Neo FreeRunner before it will successful start. The sd card also has to be configured with 2 partitions. The first may be fat32 or ext3, but may not be bigger than 256mb. (Edit: Some people has already stated it work with a bigger partition) The second partition has to be ext3. The first partition will be used for storage for music/pictures/movies/... The second will be used for storing settings and for cache.
  
  These partition should preferable be empty, because the Android can stop booting if he finds certain files in one of the two partitions. (That gave the early people who tried running Android a headache. After hours of trying and chatting on the openmoko channel, we finally figured it out.
  
  If you follow these instruction on the wiki for partitioning and formatting your sd card, Android should boot.
  
  
• The SIM card: Firstly you will have to disable PIN security on your SIM card. (You will have to disable it with another phone, because there is no distribution for the FreeRunner that allow you to disable PIN security) (Edit: Apparantly you can disable PIN security in Qt extended) If you don't do this, Android will ask you to type your PIN on boot. That's no problem, because you get an onscreen keypad for typing your PIN, but even if you type the correct PIN code, the android will tell you otherwise. So you will not get past that screen.
  
  Also you need a working SIM card in the FreeRunner, before Android will start. On the other hand, there are already people confirming they can start the android without SIM card. Though there are also people confirming they need a SIM card, before the Android will start. So if you want to try Android, you have more chance for letting it work if you insert a working SIM card.
  
  
• Power: Make sure your battery is not empty. I just say this, because you can't tell the difference between a booting Android and a Neo FreeRunner that has an empty battery. They have both black screens.
  
  
• U-boot: Normally it should be no problem for booting Android with an older bootloader. Though if you don't get your Android working, maybe try upgrading your u-boot to the newest version.

Installing Android

• Download the Android images made by Sean McNeil
• Flash them using Dfu-util or the easier Neotool. It is at the moment not possible for putting the Android on a SD card. So you will have to overwrite the distro that's located on your Nand memory.

Now you will be able to boot the Android. Just boot by pressing the power button and wait. First you will have a black screen for a minute or two and then the icon of Android will appear. After another minute, you will see the home screen.

Configuring Android

• Disable screen timeout: If you don't disable the screen timeout, Android will go into suspend after a minute. The problem is, you will not get Android out of suspend, so you should better disable it. You can do that by scrolling the main button up, than click on the icon 'settings'. Than click on 'Sound & Display', than scroll down and push 'Screen timeout' and choose 'Never timeout'.

Navigating Android

• The aux button is the back button. So if you want to leave some part of the system, you will have to press the aux button.
• The power button (if you press it shortly) is the menu button. This will give you extra buttons for doing various things. (like customizing)
• The power button (if you hold it for 2 second) will lock the screen. I don't get it out of this state without rebooting.
  
• The power button (if you hold it for 4 second) will give you the closing menu. This will let you shutdown Android or choose silent mode.
• The power button (if you hold it for 10 seconds) will shutdown android.
  

What's working?

• The GUI: The graphical interface of Android is totally working. There are some glitches with transparency, but it's still very usable. Also the GUI seems to respond very fast.
• Calling: Some people are saying they can place outgoing calls, but that's not the majority of the people trying the Android. (And the sound isn't loud enough for understanding eachother) With my Neo FreeRunner I always get 'No SIM card' and can't call other people. Also nobody has already archieved to attend incoming calls.
• SMS: You will not be able to send SMS, because there is no onscreen keyboard and that will probably not change very soon. Although Google has already announced they would make one in the first quarter of 2009, maybe somebody of the community can make an onscreen keyboard in the meanwhile. I also don't have read about someone receiving SMS. (Edit: Some people have claimed they can receive SMS)
  
• WIFI/GPS/...: The hardware specific code isn't fully ported yet, so these services will not work now. But Sean McNeil and other people are still busy with porting the Android. So maybe soon.
• Batterly life: Because the Android can't go out of suspend, we have configured Android to not to suspend. So battery life will suck. I had a battery life of 6 hours yesterday. But this will most lickely become better.

Edit: I've added some remarks that were in the comments of this blogpost. Thanks Ceci and Tobias, I appreciate it.

Porting Android, Phase 3: Done

Many blog are now celebrating the successful port of Android. I want to warn everybody, the port isn't done. But today we have images to test android on our Neo FreeRunner.

In short

1. Make compatible Linux kernel (done)
   
2. Replace ARMv5 specific code (done)
3. Create images (done)
   
4. Replace hardware specific code
5. Adding additional software, like on-screen keyboard

Getting the images

• download the images
• flash the images with neotool to nand (You cannot boot from sdcard)
  
• make sure you have an fat32 and ext3 partition on you sdcard (Important, else it will not boot)
• make sure the sdcard and the simcard are properly installed
• boot the images

ps. The android isn't usable for daily usage. SMS + calling doesn't work and it suspends after a while. Also wifi doesn't work.

Back to basics: Update

We are now 2 weeks (and a few days) after Openmoko announced the 'back to basics' plan. Let's look at the changes.

After one week they had all of us fooled. Most of us thought Openmoko hadn't done a thing. But a day later they gave us a rather long list of things they had done. Also this week, they have worked on the plan and they even got a real name, the 'Optimization' team.

What are the main things they did?

• The main problem with the touchscreen is when you try to scroll through a list. It's hard to keep your finger on the screen the whole time. Sometimes you lift your finger of the touchscreen and the FreeRunner things you clicked somewhere. That's now solved in 'testing' image, because those finger presses are filtered if they happen withing 0.3 sec of each other.
• Secondly they fixed the testing images. It wouldn't start because of some Wifi trouble. After that, they still have some trouble with the newest release of illume. (Some applications will not launch.)
• The echo when someone is calling to the FreeRunner should be solved, but a part of the people are still complaining of the echo. So Openmoko is looking into making a new firmware of the calypso gsm modem. They got green light of TI for letting the users upgrade their calypso modem themselves. (Thank you TI) Plus they have hired someone new for diving into that chip in particularly. Also they are still experimenting with alsa state file for better audio quality, but it's hard to find an alsa state file that works for everyone.
• Also there's made an image with the speedup's from previous week.
• The Optimization team is also looking into the suspend/resume issues. Nothing earthshaking is happened on these issues, except they are analyzing the issues.

Official status report