Weekly Status Report, W51/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 51/2008 (December 15 - 21, 2008):

• Misc Development:
  The removal of the "what's related" sidebar has been completed (it was probably mostly unused, had privacy implications, and unmaintained binary code). Everyone missing it should watch out for the Alexa sidebar add-on.
• Releases:
  We released SeaMonkey 1.1.14 on Tuesday. As we did the first build run a bit later than Firefox, we already did include the fix the Mozilla Corporation people "forgot" in some shipped 2.0.0.19 builds and so couldn't come in the problem of potentially shipping the wrong builds. 1.1.14 includes all fixes that are in Firefox 2.0.0.20, and there will be future 1.1.x security update releases, even though Firefox will not ship 2.x updates at the same time any more.
• Automated Tests:
  We had some test failures occurring on SeaMonkey lately, and a long-standing leak issue I had been thinking about off and on.
  As I "caused" one of the failures by enabling that test in SeaMonkey with the places patch, I tried to figure out was was going on with it and created a patch that moves it into Firefox-specific code as it uses features only supported there.
  Another test had been failing since it was introduced and what it tests doesn't even work on my local Firefox builds but somehow succeeds in their tinderboxes, not on SeaMonkey's though - it looks like opening documents in new windows isn't as clean as it should be. I created a fix that could go in and marked the test todo for SeaMonkey, but "unfortunately" it half-succeeds on Windows, so this isn't completely done yet.
  The long-standing EM RDF leak had been mitigated somewhat by a recent EM fix, and after Dave Townsend ("Mossop") reminded me that there was a JS workaround in the bug, I decided to clean that one up and worked it into a patch that removes the EM datasources on window unload, and the helped our leak reports quite a bit.
• Download Manager:
  We've been planning for some time to move to the toolkit download manager backend, but always wanted to keep a tree-based download window similar to what SeaMonkey 1.x has (which was one of the motivations for toolkit getting a nice way to plug custom UI onto their backend). I invested some time into trying how we can do that this week. I hope to have more progress soon, what I have currently is basically a very rough sample, more a proof of concept than a usable download manager.
• SeaMonkey Vision:
  As our current project goals wiki document becomes (out)dated and the main goal of "keep a suite which is similar from a user's perspective to Mozilla 1.7.x" is something we have achieved in the SeaMonkey 1.x release series and keeping the project alive, and even the "plan to move to toolkit/ for the sake of code maintenance" becomes reality with SeaMonkey 2, I had started a thread on longer-term SeaMonkey goals a while ago, with the prospect of forming a real vision for the project from the comments of the community.
  This week, I summarized the comments and later grouped what they were saying by topics. This will form the base of our future vision, for which I'll make a proposal to the SeaMonkey Council soon.
• German L10n:
  Mostly ongoing work to keep up with comm-central and 1.9.1 development.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, places prefs, Get All Messages, tabmail, fishcam, etc.

We're nearing the probably only few days in the year where many of us find some silence and time for some non-work activities with their family and friends. I wish everyone who is celebrating this week a very Merry Christmas and hope they'll have relaxing and peaceful holidays.
To everyone not celebrating this holiday (right now), I want to apologize for not responding as fast as usual this upcoming week - I need this time out myself to gather strength for the upcoming year, where we're planning on doing great things for SeaMonkey!