Mozilla Webcompat Team New Management

So the Mozilla Webcompat team is entering a new era. Mike Taylor (by the time this will be published) was the manager of the webcompat team at Mozilla since August 2015. He decided to leave. Monday, September 21 was his last day. We had to file an issue about this.

The new interim manager is… well… myself.

So last week and this week will be a lot about:

• have a better understanding of the tasks and meetings that Mike was attending.
• trying to readjust schedules and understanding how to get a bit of sleep with a distributed organization which has most of its meeting toward friendly European and American time zones. Basically, all meetings are outside the reasonable working timeframe (8:00 to 17:00 Japan Time).
• trying to figure out how to switch from peer to manager with the other persons in the webcompat team. I want to remove any sources of stress.

Hence these notes restarting. I will try to keep a track of what I do and what I learn both for the public, but mostly for my team mates.

Currently the Mozilla webcompat team is composed of these wonderful people:

Regular Contributors:

Softvision Contractors:

Mozilla Employees:

• Dennis Schubert (Germany)
• James Graham (United Kingdom)
• Ksenia Berezina (Ontario, Canada)
• Thomas Wisniewski (Ontatio, Canada)

A lot of reading, a lot of thinking around management (probably more about that later).

I always said to Mike (and previous managers) in the past, that I was not interested in management position. But I deeply care about the webcompat project, and I want it to thrive as much as possible. I never associated management with a sense of promotion or career growth. I'm very careful about the issues that positions of power create both ways: from the manager toward the people being managed and from the people toward their manager. Power is a often tool of corruption and abuse and makes some people abandon their sense of autonomy and responsibility. The interim word in the title here is quite important. If someone more qualified wants to jump into the job, please reach out to Lonnen or Andrew Overholt. If anyone from the webcompat team is not satisfied, I will happily step down.

Last but not least, Thanks to Mike to have done this job for the last couple of years. Mike has a talent for being human and in touch with people. I wish a bright journey on his new endeavors.

Firefox Cross-Functional meeting

• Goal: Coordinate what is ready to be shipped in Firefox and keep track of the projects status
• When: Wednesday 09:00-10:00 (PDT) - Thursday 01:00-02:00 (JST) (will be 02:00-03:00 winter time)
• Frequency: Every 3 weeks
• Owner: Thomas Elin
• Notes: The meeting is using trello to track the shipping of Firefox features. The Webcompat relevant cards (Members only) need to be updated every 2 weeks (Tuesday morning Japan Time aka Monday evening for the rest of the world). I didn't attend. They have a slides deck which is not accessible to public unfortunately.

ETP workarounds for site breakage

Rachel Tublitz asked to give an update about ETP workarounds for site breakage for the What's New with Firefox 82 for the SUMO team. She's doing an amazing job at compiling information for the sumo team to be prepared in advance of the release and be able to support users.

Thomas delivered on it two months ago. Add support for shimming resources blocked by Tracking Protection. The progress is tracked on the webcompat OKR board. Latest update from Thomas is

We're likely to slip the release of ETP shims slip into the 83 release instead of 82, due to the UX team wanting some more time to think through the way the ETP "blocked content" interfaces interact with shims. In that case they will continue to be a nightly-only feature during the 82 release cycle.

Webcompat reported on Fenix

Congrats on Dennis for releasing AC Report Site Issue improvements. This is done.

WPT sync to Python 3

WPT stands for Web Platform Tests. The code was in python 2 and it has been fully ported to Python 3 by James. This created a major sync issue at a point that James recovered these last couple of days and started to implement safe guards for it to not happen again.

Webcompat Outreach Generator

Ksenia has been on a tool for generating outreach templates to contact people with regards to web compatibility issues. She has been using Svelte and the work seems to be in a pretty good shape. Mike and Guillaume have been helping with the review.

Webcompat triage and testing

Oana and Ciprian have tiredlessly triaged all the incoming issues of webcompat. And more specifically starting to test some JavaScript frameworks to detect webcompat issues. The JS frameworks were installed by Guillaume.

Webcompat Bug Triage Priority

How do define the priority on bugs causing webcompat issues?

• P1: This bug breaks either a lot of sites, or a top site. It should be fixed first.
• P2: This bug breaks either a lot of sites, or a top site. It should be fixed next.
• P3: This bugs breaks some sites, and should eventually get next. These bugs probably end up as P2s and P1s at some point.

Some webcompat bugs

• Google Chrome team will create a counter for CSS Zoom and that's a good thing. This is a non standard property which has been used frequently and creates webcompat issues for Firefox. With a counter on Chrome, we can better understand if css zoom is an unfortunate ugliness of the platform we need to spec and implement or if blink and WebKit can try to make obsolete.
• This flexbox fix has happened and that's very cool.

Some meetings

• The Channel meeting is happening twice a week to check in on the status of the active releases with the release team. Latest happened on 2020-09-21. They include links to postmortem such as the release 80.

Some notes, thoughts

• Too many documents are without public access, that's not a good thing for a project like Mozilla and it creates barrier for participation. In the context of the webcompat team, I'll try as much as possible to have all our work in public. We already do pretty good, but we can even do better.
• Discovering about:pioneer in Firefox Nightly.
• setup all the 1:1 meetings with my peers. It will be a busy Tuesday.
• a lot of the passing of information is just copy of things already existing somewhere, but where the links were not given. Maybe it's just an intrinsic part of our human nature.
• Solving some access issues for a bit of devops.
• Hopefully next week will be less about understanding the management tools and more about helping people work

Otsukare!