Firefox/Platform Engineering Update 39.2

Chris Peterson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.mozilla.devel.seamonkey
Message-ID <[email protected]>
This engineering update is also available on the Platform wiki:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2015-03-25


# Firefox Release Schedule (lmandel)

We shipped two chemspills over the weekend: Firefox 36.0.3 and 36.0.4 
(plus Firefox ESR 31.5.2 and 31.5.3)

Firefox 37 is scheduled to be released on March 31. That's next week! 
For Firefox 37 Beta/Release, please report any keyboard related issues 
on OS X such as the keyboard stopping to work and requiring a browser 
restart.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar


# MEM SHRINK (njn)

jemalloc3 has been disabled again on trunk due to Windows crashes. The 
heap allocator is a fundamental thing and changing it in a complex 
program like a browser is hard.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=762449#c54

Thanks to Jim Blandy, jemalloc (the old version currently used in 
Firefox releases, not jemalloc3) is now used as the allocator for the 
JavaScript shell, instead of the system allocator (bug 1134039). This 
makes the shell configuration closer to the browser configuration, which 
will make arewefastyet.com results more representative. But we don't yet 
have data on whether those results have changed significantly due to 
some OS X problems (bug 1146267). It's worth repeating: changing the 
heap allocator is hard.

about:memory now has a "resident-peak" measurement (bug 1145007) on Unix 
(Linux, OSX, *BSD), which measures peak physical memory usage for the 
process. It may be useful for detecting short-lived spikes in memory usage.

The new Reader View feature was causing high memory usage on desktop 
Nightly, but has been fixed in bug 1139678.


# MEDIA

In Firefox 37, the Media team is shipping the MSE API (Media Source 
Extensions, bug 778617) to improve YouTube's HTML5 video playback on 
Windows. YouTube will now default to HTML5 video instead of Flash on 
Windows. MSE for OS X is being tested in Aurora 38.


# SHUMWAY

The Shumway team continues to focus on improving startup performance and 
Flash ad rendering.
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