Tomcat’s Blog

So finally arrived at Home after a total travel time of 35 hours or so !I think it was a great and sucessfull Summit and a great Team Building Event !

Special thanks to Dan, Justin and everyone at the Summit!

So finally some of us arrived at Vancouver Airport. For my 1am Transfer Bus from Whistler to Vancouver we took about 6hours 20 minutes. A very nice and fast drive.

So since Mozillians are very spontaneous and communicative, so we have setup at kind of “Mozilla Airport Camp” at the main Area between the US and International Check-in/Depature.

So if you are at Vancouver Airport currently, come and say hi and if you have not already, sign the big Firefox Summit Board.

- P.S its still always great , how Airport/Airline Staff and other Passengers react when they see  we are related to Firefox (also a kind of evanglism

I actually traveled a lot in the last months with airplanes and flying can be so much fun.

On my most flights i was wearing a Firefox T-shirt and its so great to see other People recognizing the Firefox Logo and Firefox itself.

On the last flight from Frankfurt to Portland for OSCON i was wearing the old (but still nice Firefox 1.5 Tshirt) and the Lufthansa Captain of this Plane talked to me and told me that i need to update to Firefox 3

Still great to see this Firefox Adoption and makes me very proud to be part of this Project.

In other news …as you might know we are trapped here in Whistler at the Firefox Summit (thanks Canada, we love to be here, but we need to get home some day but the Crew is working hard to bring us safe home (and the long (8h!) bus-trip to Vancouver will be fun

Will be blogging more over the Firefox Summit later.

- Tomcat

Yesterday morning i arrived after a great Flight  (thanks to a wonderful Lufthansa Crew) in Portland to attend the OSCON Confernence.

If you are in Portland, join us for the QA Session, the BOF or FOSSCOACH at OSCON.

- Tomcat

Yeah ! We have relased Firefox 3 !

A great day and for me as member of the Mozilla QA Team the 2nd Major Release after Thunderbird 2. Firefox 3 is a great browser with Great Features like Awesomebar and the other cool new stuff !

Great work from the Developers, Webdev, Marketing, Localizers, Testers and our great Community all over the world …oh and yeah also from QA

And a big thanks also to the lots of Community Testers on Testdays and Bugdays ! Hope to see you also on the Testdays and Bugdays after the Firefox 3 Release

And now today is time to celebrate a little and time to set a world record !

Hi Guys,

Hope to see you tomorrow on the AirMozilla Live Session !

AirMozilla Live - Download Day and the Firefox 3 Release ..should be a great Day !

- Tomcat

Bug Days are an excellent way to contribute to Mozilla’s QA efforts. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been involved with Mozilla for years or if this is your first step into our amazing open source community.  Anyone can participate and be a valuable contributor. We gather together at predetermined times to focus on particular areas in Bugzilla. The exact area or topic for Bug Day may vary week to week. But the general idea is to work through bug list as a team.

The Firefox Bugdays are currently focused on unconfirmed Firefox Bugs filed in the last 2 weeks and expecially focused to confirm or close critical bugs like “crashes” or “hangs”.

You can find the Annoucement and Bugday Query for the next Bugday on Tuesday June 10, 2008 on  http://quality.mozilla.org/node/1717

The Firefox Bugday Sessions are Tuesday for 3 different Timezones (to give everyone in our worldwide Community the Chance to join) in the IRC channel #bugday on irc.mozilla.org

The 3 Session are:
* Asia session - 14:00-16:00 (Beijing local time CST)
* Euro session - 14:00-16:00 (Berlin local time CEST)
* Amer. session - 12:00-14:00 (Los Angeles localtime PDT)

(Of course you can join any session, please see http://quality.mozilla.org/events/bug-days#Schedule for your timezone).

You can find more Information about the Firefox Bugdays on http://quality.mozilla.org/events/bug-days

There is also a Thunderbird Bugday every week !

See you on Bugday next Tuesday !

- Tomcat

Hey Guys,

there is a QA Community Testday this Friday (June 6) in the Testday Channel #testday on irc.mozilla.org from 7am-5pm.

I hope you join us too and this will be one of the biggest testdays this Year. Feel free to hammer on the Firefox 3 RC 2 Build and let us know when you have Questions or when you have discovered a Problem/Bug, Members of the Mozilla QA Team will be in the #testday channel during the whole testday !

More Information about this Testday can be found on http://quality.mozilla.org/node/1710

And if you have not already noticed the great Firefox Download Day World Record Attempt ! Please join and plege now ! (especially when you are from Germany 

- Tomcat

Hi

If you have not already seen this, Stuart has made a awesome Post about the Firefox 3 Memory Usage.

A big part of my tasks on the Mozilla QA Team is currently to test Firefox 3 Beta Builds and especially Add-ons for memory leaks. During my Tests over the last months we fixed a lot of Memory Leaks. A lot of Developers have done a great job and we still continue to improve Firefox. So far i can say the Performance of the Firefox Beta Builds is very awesome !

I’d like to specifically thank: Jonas Sicking, Ben Turner, David Baron, Peter Van der Beken, Jesse Ruderman, Mark Finkle, Bob Clary and everyone else who helped me to start working on memory leak testing.

There are so many wonderful and great Add-ons out there for Firefox and i work on maintaining  the great performance of Firefox 3 also with a lot of Extensions installed.So my Focus is on memory leak testing for extensions and also performance testing of extensions.

We have a lot of tools that can be used for Memory Leak Testing. Currently  i do all this leak testing manually and I do using Debug Builds and Leak Gauge.

Leak Gauge is developed by David Baron and is very easy to use. You don’t need to install any additional Software to run it. For anyone interested in Leak Testing and especially for AMO-Editors and Extension Developers, I have created a How-To Documentation for Leak Gauge, which covers to file a memory leak bug and also with steps i follow in my Memory Leak Testing. Check it out at http://wiki.mozilla.org/QA:Home_Page:Firefox_3.0_TestPlan:Leaks:LeakTesting-How-To

We have also more plans for the future like a Best Practice Documentation on how to avoid memory leaks in Extensions . I am also thinking and working on ways to automate the Add-on Performance Testing….so stay tuned

If you have questions/comments/suggestions, feel free to email me or to ping me on irc !

- Tomcat

Thanks for a very great Firefox 3 Beta 3 Testday last Friday !

You can find the results here.

We have also a Friday this Testday ! Hope you will join us on this testday too !

- Tomcat