Forum: Weblog comments

Just jump to 1.9.3!
Don't make it difficult by doing interim stuff in 1.9.2.
Just keep 2.0.x maintenance releases for stability/security only.

Maybe just for the sake of playing devil's advocate compared to the previous comment, I'd say: Keep It Safe and Stable.

Some Firefox releases in the past (such as 3.5) wanted to introduce too many features too fast, and as a result they were not adequately tested and therefore buggy and even crashy. SeaMonkey 2, OTOH, always impressed me by its stability, starting right when Suiterunner still called itself "SeaMonkey 1.5a" and had two sets of Preferences windows which changed almost daily according to which ones were ported from xpfe to Toolkit.

Don't let go of that stability for the sake of new features. Any features which aren't yet 100% ready for Sm 2.1.0 will get into 2.1.5 or 2.2 — I'd say time plays in our favour. After all, a crash in Firefox leaves Thunderbird up, but a crash in the SeaMonkey browser also brings down MailNews, so the Suite concept has more need for stability than the "separate applications" concept.

To me, the affect of stability was helped by both us always making sure we were dogfoodable and mozilla with its new testing infra and us even taking advantage of it, and making sure things did not break THEM based on OUR settings, or fixing THEM when our settings exposed a bug.

We even had/have our own testing infra (and TB devs even instituted a stricter testing infra for their own patches now).

This should ensure that the stability doesn't waver below what the "post suiterunner" stability was.

That said, my personal opinion is to keep 2.1 working for 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 until we know the timeline of 1.9.3's next release. Once we know that we can make a final decision. and if we don't know the timeline when we get closer to our planned release date we can release off 1.9.2 and be happy that we still met our goals.

The pain point[s] would be to keep 1.9.3 working through all that, and whenever TB decides we need to cut to c-c branch... But we can work around that.

My personal desires for SM2.next is to define the "key features we want to take" ++ "extra features would be nice" independent of what 1.9.2/1.9.3 brings. This way we can be sure to have an iterative experience for our users, beyond just a Gecko update.

The exact branch is a seperate issue that is relatively easy to tackle.

Please make x86_64 bits as a standard platform for release too. Only 32bits are available for release whereas x86_64 is only available for nightly or pre builds.
Regards.

It'll be nice to try out 2.1 when it's available, just to see if it's fixed any of 2.0.x's problems. Personally, I'm through with testing 2.0.x and am going to continue using 1.1.x for the time being, but I'm willing to give 2.1 a shot.

What about saving pages with all CSS and images in SM 2.1?

And it would be great to include option to disable download error dialogs.
1-30 dialogs per page for half of all pages force me to continue to use SM 1 as main browser and SM 2 as a second.
(I block images in AdBlock Plus and save pages offline)

I think that if you want to continue with Gecko 1.9.3,
you should release a stable release with Gecko 1.9.2 (which should be more easy as Gecko 1.9.3 was already released).
it may include less SM improvements, but it'll be better if there will be SM stable version with the performance improvements of Gecko 1.9.2

I would ask for x64 version. Also kind of calendar alternative would be quite useful. Possible a kind of a plugin-application for gmail to the Seamonkey suite. And one thing, it would be quite nice to make faster the closing of the Seamonkey. Sometimes I close SM and after few minutes when I try to open it, it says, that it is still running.
Anyway I am more for good stability more then for new features. Keep up the good work!

Personally from user's perspective I strongly support Kairo's vision of the suite's future as the ability to use tabs instead of windows for all Seamonkey components and plug-ins (mail, calendar, preferences, etc.).
It's very important for this purpose to improve the tabs functionality - to make them scrollable so all hidden tabs (as the result of overflow while opening numerous tabs) could be reached easily. I vote for the sooner new tabs functionality implementation as a priority for new Seamonkey releases.
And many thanks for all great work done for developing and supporting the nice suite.