Weekly Status Report, W09/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 09/2009 (February 23 - March 1, 2009):

• Conferences:
  As mentioned before, I spent most of this week in Geneva at Lift09 which was a really great experience, including one of opening my mind some more for things beyond SeaMonkey and Mozilla and getting ideas and creativity flowing somewhat more again.
• Release Management:
  SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3 needed a second build, which I tagged and built (also including a late version fix). Testing seems to be mostly complete now and we should be able to push it to the public within the next day or so.
• Misc Work:
  Following a pointer we got from a user by email, I updated branch copyright to 2009 so that this will be correct in our 1.1.15 release.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Our 13 experimental language packs for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3,could be forwarded straight to build 2.
• German L10n:
  Once again, I could keep German SeaMonkey up-to-date with trunk, adding some venkman fixes found by Robert Brand as well.
• Various Discussions:
  (Un)forking of mailnews files, print (preview) crashes, HTML5, urlbar autocomplete click behavior, returning builds on tinderbox, release schedules, MAOW Berlin, Lightning, Talos and FF 3.0, video and messages, etc.

Our 3rd alpha for SeaMonkey 2 is just around the corner, debuting the new "places" history storage and smart location bar, password manager improvements, customizable browser toolbars as well as session/crash restore. We have found the second build to be well-fitted for widespread testing, it's now just a matter of organizational matters to release this milestone to the public.

As the Firefox team has announced that they will do a fourth beta of their 3.1 release and the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform, we probably might roughly sync our upcoming first beta with this Mozilla milestone and possibly also target to go final with Thunderbird 3 and SeaMonkey 2 around the same time that Firefox 3.1 hits the market if we stick to the original plans for those releases, but our teams need to discuss that further - it's for example not clear if it's a good idea to hit download servers and news resources at a point in time where a Firefox release overshadows everything else happening and possibly makes infrastructure usage spike. We'll see in the next few weeks how that decision influences our release plans.

For now, enjoy all the goodies of SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 - we're already working on even more improvements for the beta cycle!