Help us finish Firefox 4

Where to focus your efforts if you want to help out

We’re very close to releasing Firefox 4, and the team & contributors are doing amazing work these days to fix the final remaining bugs, and get the new version out the door.

The current plan is to ship two more betas — beta 10 & beta 11 — so we have until the end of the month — that’s 7 days as of this writing — until beta 11 freezes. More information in Christian Legnitto’s post about the release schedule.

If you’re an employee or contractor for Mozilla, your job is pretty clear:

Get the number of hard blockers down to zero.

In addition to the “hard blockers” — essentially, bugs we will delay the release for — there’s a category called “soft blockers.” These are bugs and improvements that we wouldn’t hold the release for in isolation, but if we didn’t fix any of them, the product we’re shipping won’t of be the quality you expect from Firefox. So it’s an aggregate way of looking at it, and we’d like to fix as many of these as possible before release.

This is where you as a community member can make a difference. If you’re a community member — or have exhausted the hard blockers you are capable of helping with — your next step should be to look at the list of soft blockers, and help resolve these.

A large number of UI bugs naturally falls into the soft blocker end of the spectrum, since they are often a case of “this is unfortunate, but not a showstopper” — with some obvious exceptions. We know we can’t get them all fixed before the release, but that won’t stop us from trying!

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How do you choose which soft blockers to pick up if you want to improve the user experience of Firefox 4, and have exhausted the hard blockers you can help with? There are some bugs that we’d like to call out, that we think would make Firefox 4 a lot better:

• Fix one of the very visible bugs in the main window — A large number of these bugs are tracked via the live updated, annotated screenshots on areweprettyyet.com¹. ¹ The name started as a reference to its sister site, arewefastyet.com, which tracks Firefox JavaScript performance against other web browsers. Of course, we list things that are more about interactions and that are more than skin deep, but the name stuck, and “pretty” in this context means more than just pixel-level polish. Make sure you take a look at all the different areas listed under the “Project” menu, and also note that you can list all the bugs in a particular project in Bugzilla form by going to “Actions” → “View all bugs in a Bugzilla table.”
• Help clean up the “traditional” menu (used on Windows XP, Mac OS X and some variants of Linux) — this is mostly simple fixes to move or remove menu items now that the necessary infrastructure support for this (bug 607224) has landed. See Alex Faaborg’s comprehensive overview of the changes that need to be done.
• Help simplify the add-ons manager — the tracking bug for this is bug 623250, and Jennifer Boriss has also blogged about this. Several of these are a simple matter of just knowing enough about CSS to help out.
• Update Start page with no string impact — bug 627301
• Remaining work on the URL preview — bugs 625952, 625945, 625956.
• Add-on bar missing shortcut — bug 616015
• Animation when closing doorhangers, so it's obvious how to get them back — bug 610545 (requested soft blocker)
• Styles for geolocation and password manager (bug 615471) + site identity (bug 610053)
• Streamline search field, has patch that works on all platforms except XP right now, bug 592909
• Search field isn't tab-specific when tabs are on top, which breaks the conceptual & visual hierarchy: bug 565740
• Any other bug on the soft blocker list.

Firefox 4 is already an amazing release — you’re running the betas, right? — and this is your chance to help put it over the top by fixing one of the soft blockers. If you have any comments or need help getting started, you can find me on Twitter.