Progress and help-wanted on SeaMonkey 2

I just received a link to a screen shot of SeaMonkey 2 with customized toolbars (this is work in progress, not in nightlies yet, see bug 394288), so I decided to give you a (probably incomplete) overview of current in-work items for SeaMonkey 2 (in no particular order) - and some we'd need help on.

• As mentioned above, the work on customizable toolbars is done by Philip Chee, and his work is nearing a state that could possibly be included in our development codebase. At first, this will only be available for the browser component, work on other parts will possibly follow later.
• Teune van Steeg is working on notification bars for the browser, which are basically already included in current nightlies, just not used by anything yet. Teune is currently working on making use of this feature, e.g. for installing extensions from blocked sites, missing plugins or popup blocking.
• Another quite active area currently is feed support. Justin Wood is leading that effort, our module owner Neil Rashbrook is helping with some parts there. The first target is to get browser support, mainly for discovery and preview of feeds as well as hooks to subscribe to them. At a later stage, we might even get livemarks support, but probably after getting a feed reader in the mail/news component, which will probably be Justin's next target after initial browser support.
• The preferences migration, targeting to base the SeaMonkey preferences window on the toolkit-style <preferences> family of XUL elements though keeping the familiar look and feel of the suite preferences window, is led by Karsten Düsterloh. The initial work of providing the new window is done already, until migrating all panels is done, we have two menuitems in the browser component, one leading to the new window with the already-migrated panels, one to the legacy window with the not yet migrated ones. That area of migrating pref panes should be a relatively easy one for newcomers to help out.
• Vista users might have noticed that SeaMonkey 1.1.x integration with the new Microsoft OS is not ideal, Frank Wein is working on this among other things when replacing the old "winhooks" code with a new shell service implementation, fitting the style of other toolkit applications. This will also fix an area where localized nightly build show problems.
• Mark Banner is currently working on our migration from wallet to LoginManager for password management, the toughest part of which is that the mail/news code needs to use the new password manager, which is in turn blocked by core LoginManager code not supporting all we need yet. Once Mark has fixed that core code, we should be able to throw another old unmaintained code module away and replace it with cleaner, new code. That will also fix another current case of problems with CVS-based localization.

Some areas still would badly need help though:

• Using the sqlite-based places backend provided by the Mozilla toolkit would probably be a good idea, at least for browser history. After we now can use XUL templates with mozStorage templates, it should not be too hard to get our history UI hooked up with that.
  If that works well, it might even be an interesting idea to use the places bookmarks backend, though without changing the UI we use in the suite for that feature (the backend change would make up the way for extension to try other UI there).
• The download manager should pick up at least the new backend provided by the Mozilla toolkit, which supports goodies like cross-session resuming of downloads. This also will/should fix the probably biggest remaining problem with CVS.based localized builds - and note that there is a KaiRo.at bug bounty to fetch for this work.
• Calendar support is something many people would like from an Internet suite like ours, so making the Lightning extension work on SeaMonkey is another thing we'd really like someone to help out with - and where someone could earn a KaiRo.at bug bounty.
• I think there's no bug filed on it yet, but getting Firefox' session restore ported to SeaMonkey would also be a great feature, esp. as restarting from the extension manager wouldn't make you lose all open web pages.
• Last not least, I once again need to mention the dynamic UA spoof mechanism, which has the largest KaiRo.at bug bounty of all waiting for whoever does the work, and which could help lots of users, multiple browser projects as well as make the web itself a better place.

I may left out some notable areas of current work or some areas we need help, if you feel I have omitted something worth mentioning, please comment on this blog entry!

All in all, I think there's a bunch of interesting stuff happening at the moment, but still some important things to be done before SeaMonkey 2 gets where we want it to be. Thanks for everyone already actively working on the future of the suite (those are all volunteers doing this in their free time!) - and to everyone who wants us to get even better and has some time and work to offer: please help us, either with the items mentioned above or in other ways of getting involved. There's something to do for everyone and we appreciate any help we can get!