The roads I take...

Data Manager 1.0 is available for installation now!

The major change from 0.9 is optimization to get some speed improvements. I also posted this code as the first version of patch in the SeaMonkey integration bug, preliminary review feedback indicates that there are a number of improvements I still can make and need to make before I can land it - and the add-on will profit from that as well, I'll try to keep things in sync as much as reasonable and possible between the in-SeaMonkey and add-on versions.

There's also a few thing where future feature work is needed, see the list at the end of my previous posting.

Still, I hope Data Manager improves the experience for more and more of you in the future!

I just landed a change today that switches SeaMonkey to tabbed browsing by default. Umm, yes, that sounds like a message from years ago, but it really is of today.

The Mozilla suite has been supporting tabbed browsing for a very long time, and SeaMonkey inherited that support right from the start. Still, what we also inherited and had not even changed in our huge modernizing effort in 2.0 is that the default preferences favored opening new windows in all kinds of cases. Whoever wants to use tabbed browsing in stable version of SeaMonkey up to 2.0.x need to explicitely open tabs and/or change preferences to make SeaMonkey open tabs by default.

Finally, that changes with tomorrows nightlies, SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 and the final 2.1 release expected later this or very early next year (i.e. at a very similar time to Firefox 4).

From now on, SeaMonkey will default to open links and other new pages in tabs, just like Firefox already does. Anyone who still wants windows to be opened is now the one who needs to change preferences or do it explicitely.

Thanks to Neil for swift reviews on that preferences change. This is another step towards making SeaMonkey actually show that it really is a modern browser - and more.

I've just uploaded version 0.9 of Data Manager to AMO.

That release actually marks a very important milestone: All I wanted to achieve in Data Manager 1.0 is done, this marks feature completeness in that regard!

The changes from 0.8 are reacting to the remaining data changes (form data, content prefs, permissions) and working with the new XPCOM registration in current nightlies. Actually, the only reason this is version 0.9 and not 1.0 is because I'd like a bit more testing before calling it that - feedback is very welcome! Please grab it when you can (it should go out as a public update within the next days) and test it well.

The first screen shot I made as a teaser in my first post is still accurate, but here I have a few more in addition:



As you can see, the Klingons are after my test profile these days - but thanks to the Data Manager, I have everything in tight control.

Of course, 0.9 or 1.0 are not the end of the line for Data Manager development, though, but this version will be submitted for the first patch to the SeaMonkey integration bug. After I have that up, my plans currently include the following next steps for Data Manager:

• Make it possible to directly open a specific domain/tab from other UI.
• Switch the rest of the SeaMonkey UI to call Data Manager, where needed with those hooks, so the other manager can be removed from SeaMonkey.
• Add the ability to add permissions.
• Add a tab for site storage mechanisms.
• More?

I'm planning on doing further development in the add-on and keep it available for Firefox even once it lands in SeaMonkey - which I hope can happen for our next Alpha.

Until that, Please head over to the add-ons site, install Data Manager, and test it well!

As the lightweight theme (or Personas) mechanism has been integrated into toolkit in the Mozilla 1.9.2 cycle, the SeaMonkey 2.1 builds have all the ingredients from that side, but what's missing is the suite-specific parts.

Last night, I took a shot at fixing that bug and got the install mechanism for the lightweight themes to work. After a bit more fixing up the urlbar and tabbar today, this is what I ended up with (after going through a small part of getpersonas and trying out a few ones):



I hope we can have that landed soon and also make other windows than the browser one work with this mechanism. Note that it's nothing people have to use, but a nice way of easy customization for those who want it.

Places bookmarks are progressing nicely: I did a number of updates in the last weeks for changes on the Firefox side (all dependencies are fixed now) and I also addressed the few review comments coming from Neil. Altogether, esp. due to the former changes, but also as the last round of patches and builds is more than a month old and doesn't apply cleanly to trunk any more, I decided to do a new round of patches and follow up previous rounds of try builds with a fresh version building on current SeaMonkey and Mozilla code. As a change landed yesterday on mozilla-central that breaks all non-Firefox applications and a lot of add-ons, I took the last revision before that for those builds, which should still work fine.

Here are those round 5 places bookmarks try builds:

• Linux tar.bz2
• Mac OS X .dmg
• Windows .zip
• Windows installer .exe

As with the previous rounds, please test esp. bookmarks handling in those builds, ideally with copies of real-world profiles (they might destroy anything as they are highly experimental, don't use them with any profile that has no backups) and report any issues you're seeing.

Update (July 5): As Igor Velkov (iav) noticed, I apparently built the wrong application on try. I now have done another run with the correct settings (I hope) and updated the links to point to those builds.