Update:
Firefox 10.0.1 looks set to ship Friday 2/11 (probably in the afternoon). There will be no throttling of the release and it will also be when we untrottle updates from Firefox 9.0 to Firefox 10.0.1 (those users will skip 10.0, of course).
Original post
Firefox 10 ships tomorrow! We're trying out a new release strategy which should allow us to get traction quickly and allow a brief bit of evaluation time to see if a chemspill or emergency release is needed.
Here's the current release plan:
For manual updates (that is if you go to Help > About) starting at 8 AM PST, Firefox 10 will be available. It will also be available at mozilla.org/firefox for everyone. This means that if anyone asks about updates, just tell them that they can go to Help>About (Firefox>About Firefox on mac).
For the first 24 hours (from 8 AM PST 1/31 to 8 AM PST 2/1) will be doing a partial release and not everyone will be updated.
For the next few days we'll be evaluating the feedback. This is when we'll need your help. There is a SUMO day on Thursday when the focus will be on helping these Firefox 10 users. We really really want to hear about anything that could be a top issues/regression/breakage. Please post in this thread.
Sometime Friday/Monday if everything looks good, we'll be unthrottling 100% and the release goes out to everyone.
ESR
You may have heard of ESR, which is "Extended Support Release". This is the version of Firefox we're going to be offering to Enterprise (and possibly university) users who need more than 6 weeks to qualify and deploy Firefox. Firefox 10 will be the first ESR release. You need to download a special ESR build to get it so there probably won't be many questions.
If you get asked about this from personal users, tell them it's specifically for enterprise and deployment situations (and if they need help to talk to their IT department.) If you get questions about support or issues from IT professionals, tell them to sign up for and post questions to the Enterprise working group: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise#How_to_Participate_and_Post
Top issues
The following issues are KNOWN. However, it's very unclear how widespread they are/are going to be. Please help by linking to forum questions with these issues in this thread so that we can evaluate if they're worth a stop-ship for.
- The forward button is now conditional. That is, if there is nothing to go forward to, it will be hidden. (Only if you use big buttons). This may cause some confusion with users.
- Silverlight 5 (Netflix) may not work with some graphics cards on Macs
- The two-digit user agent may confuse some websites and users may get notifications that their browser is out-of-date. Please get URLs and we'll try to work with the sites to correct this.
- Extensions are now compatible by default... that means extensions that were compatible with Firefox 4 may suddenly come back and start sort-of working again. This does not affect binary extensions (so all antivirus extensions, most toolbars and most of the common things that break.)
- OSX 10.5 users (possibly with specific older graphics drivers) will crash with the Flip4Mac plugin (which plays WMV files/streams) and with an unofficial (but popular) hack of Flash (to support 10.5).
The following issues really need users to help reproduce and figure out test cases (getting information like about:support info and what sites they're on)
- There may be a performance issue on Macs causing intermittent hangs (that gets progressively worse over time). Update: This looks to be a non-issue.
- There may be an issue where the caret (the bar that marks where you're typing, also called the cursor) disappears so you can't tell where you're typing. This may have something to do with having plugins open (possibly in a background tab). Update: There's a chance that this is related to bug 718939 which is fixed in the chemspill. Unfortunately we don't have steps to repro to prove this though. Other symptoms may include text areas not getting focus and being unable to highlight or select text.
- There may be a Windows startup crash that is the result of malware. (We don't know more, the number of users seems to have died back down but it's unclear why there was a new signature.) Update: This is more than just malware, but still unexplained.
- New: Some out of date versions of AVG Safe Search make pressing Enter in the location bar stop working. We are working on getting a full range of versions to blocklist. Users should disable the add-on or try updating AVG.
- New: Norton extensions don't work. Norton assures us that the updates exist. See this Symantec support article. However we're still getting complaints. Users may need to update Norton and then followup by re-enabling it from the add-ons manager. (Please let us know if that works.)
- New: Real Player Video Download doesn't work. This happens with pretty much every release, as Real Networks doesn't keep up with the release schedule.
- New: HTTPs does not work on some sites, often returning a connection reset. Firefox added a security measure (also in Chrome) which breaks HTTPs on some sites. Cor-el and I discuss it in depth in this forum thread which is probably a good place to point users.
EDIT: See /forums/contributors/708145#post-45089 There will be a Firefox 10.0.1
Cww said (posted February 7, 2012)
After considering the top issues, the release drivers have decided to ship a Firefox 10.0.1 to fix two issues:
1) A top startup crash (bug is security locked because it's a crash)
2) Java applets cause text areas to hang (bug 718939)
The issue with the add-ons manager is unclear at the moment but looks fixable with a hotfix so it doesn't warrant a chemspill. I'm looking to see if we can blocklist the versions of AVG Safe Search that are causing the broken location bar behavior.
All other issues need too much investigation to be actionable right now or were deemed not to be major enough and can wait until Firefox 11.
'''Update:'''
Firefox 10.0.1 looks set to ship Friday 2/11 (probably in the afternoon). There will be no throttling of the release and it will also be when we untrottle updates from Firefox 9.0 to Firefox 10.0.1 (those users will skip 10.0, of course).
'''Original post'''
Firefox 10 ships tomorrow! We're trying out a new release strategy which should allow us to get traction quickly and allow a brief bit of evaluation time to see if a chemspill or emergency release is needed.
Here's the current release plan:
For manual updates (that is if you go to Help > About) starting at 8 AM PST, Firefox 10 will be available. It will also be available at mozilla.org/firefox for everyone. This means that if anyone asks about updates, just tell them that they can go to Help>About (Firefox>About Firefox on mac).
'''For the first 24 hours''' (from 8 AM PST 1/31 to 8 AM PST 2/1) will be doing a partial release and not everyone will be updated.
'''For the next few days''' we'll be evaluating the feedback. This is when we'll need your help. There is a SUMO day on Thursday when the focus will be on helping these Firefox 10 users. We really really want to hear about anything that could be a top issues/regression/breakage. Please post in this thread.
Sometime Friday/Monday if everything looks good, we'll be unthrottling 100% and the release goes out to everyone.
'''ESR'''
You may have heard of ESR, which is "Extended Support Release". This is the version of Firefox we're going to be offering to Enterprise (and possibly university) users who need more than 6 weeks to qualify and deploy Firefox. Firefox 10 will be the first ESR release. You need to download a special ESR build to get it so there probably won't be many questions.
If you get asked about this from personal users, tell them it's specifically for enterprise and deployment situations (and if they need help to talk to their IT department.) If you get questions about support or issues from '''IT professionals''', tell them to sign up for and post questions to the Enterprise working group: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise#How_to_Participate_and_Post
'''Top issues'''
The following issues are KNOWN. However, it's very unclear how widespread they are/are going to be. Please help by linking to forum questions with these issues in this thread so that we can evaluate if they're worth a stop-ship for.
# The forward button is now conditional. That is, if there is nothing to go forward to, it will be hidden. (Only if you use big buttons). This may cause some confusion with users.
# Silverlight 5 (Netflix) may not work with some graphics cards on Macs
# The two-digit user agent may confuse some websites and users may get notifications that their browser is out-of-date. Please get URLs and we'll try to work with the sites to correct this.
# Extensions are now compatible by default... that means extensions that were compatible with Firefox 4 may suddenly come back and start sort-of working again. This does not affect binary extensions (so all antivirus extensions, most toolbars and most of the common things that break.)
# OSX 10.5 users (possibly with specific older graphics drivers) will crash with the Flip4Mac plugin (which plays WMV files/streams) and with an unofficial (but popular) hack of Flash (to support 10.5).
The following issues really need users to help reproduce and figure out test cases (getting information like about:support info and what sites they're on)
# There may be a performance issue on Macs causing intermittent hangs (that gets progressively worse over time). '''Update:''' This looks to be a non-issue.
# There may be an issue where the caret (the bar that marks where you're typing, also called the cursor) disappears so you can't tell where you're typing. This may have something to do with having plugins open (possibly in a background tab). '''Update:''' There's a chance that this is related to bug 718939 which is fixed in the chemspill. Unfortunately we don't have steps to repro to prove this though. Other symptoms may include text areas not getting focus and being unable to highlight or select text.
# There may be a Windows startup crash that is the result of malware. (We don't know more, the number of users seems to have died back down but it's unclear why there was a new signature.) '''Update:''' This is more than just malware, but still unexplained.
# '''New:''' Some out of date versions of AVG Safe Search make pressing Enter in the location bar stop working. We are working on getting a full range of versions to blocklist. Users should disable the add-on or try updating AVG.
# '''New:''' Norton extensions don't work. Norton assures us that the updates exist. See [http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Internet-Security-Norton/Firefox-10-Support-for-Norton-Toolbar/td-p/648241 this Symantec support article]. However we're still getting complaints. Users may need to update Norton and then followup by re-enabling it from the add-ons manager. (Please let us know if that works.)
# '''New:''' Real Player Video Download doesn't work. This happens with pretty much every release, as Real Networks doesn't keep up with the release schedule.
# '''New:''' HTTPs does not work on some sites, often returning a connection reset. Firefox added a security measure (also in Chrome) which breaks HTTPs on some sites. Cor-el and I discuss it in depth in [/questions/918127 this forum thread] which is probably a good place to point users.
'''EDIT:''' See [/forums/contributors/708145#post-45089] There will be a Firefox 10.0.1
''Cww said (posted February 7, 2012)''
<blockquote>
After considering the top issues, the release drivers have decided to ship a Firefox 10.0.1 to fix two issues:
<br><br>
1) A top startup crash (bug is security locked because it's a crash)
<br><br>
2) Java applets cause text areas to hang (bug 718939)
<br> <br>
The issue with the add-ons manager is unclear at the moment but looks fixable with a hotfix so it doesn't warrant a chemspill. I'm looking to see if we can blocklist the versions of AVG Safe Search that are causing the broken location bar behavior.
<br> <br>
All other issues need too much investigation to be actionable right now or were deemed not to be major enough and can wait until Firefox 11.
</blockquote>
