A Compendium of Awesome

Two weeks ago, the Firefox team got together for a work week in Toronto. It was amazing. Walking through a room with that many excellent people doing excellent things was inspiringhumblingunbelievable and the hits kept on rolling.

The combined mobile and graphics teams cut the beta blocker list for Fennec Native in half. The desktop team banged together a working prototype of sign in to the browser. The firefox tech leads worked with product and project management to nail down the kilimanjaro bug list for desktop. Madhava gave a great talk about the future of Firefox UX. I would have scored it as a strong success based on those outcomes alone.

And then this happened:

Hacking

• Scratchpad backending to github gists
• Jetpacks in scratchpad
• Task-specific icons in Windows 7 jumplists
• Finalized interactions and designs for the new downloads manager
• Sync meet-up and discussion to evaluate how to move forward with a smaller core, by moving data handling to components and allowing the Sync team to concentrate on the real Sync functionality
• Session Store meet-up and discussion on how to move forward with “Speedy Session Restore” as well as SS2 (rewriting SS).
• Initial explorations of a Fennec reading mode (post-1.0)
• Implemented Windows 8 appbar
• Roll your own one-off, bespoke debuggers in the scratchpad.
• Responsive Design tool for web developers

Lightning Talks

• Honza made Firebug’s HTTP Monitor a standalone component, and it can now remote-monitor fennec, too
• Gavin gave a great talk about code review
• Tim Abraldes demoed the Web App runtime
• Margaret walked us through Hacking Fennec
• Brian Bondy updated the status of our Windows 8 work
• Felipe found and fixed memory leaks with about:cc
• Dietrich walked through the state of the browser components team
• David Dahl went meta, and talked about giving Firefox talks in our community

I know I’ve missed things. I know some of it is still being written up. In fact, I’m not even the first to write a round up post. Here’s Finkle doing the same, and dcamp, and cwiiis.

FX-Team is big enough these days that it’s quite an undertaking to get us all together in one place. But man, it’s phenomenal when we do.