Weekly Status Report, W44/2007

Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work items in week 44/2007 (October 29 - November 4):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  Most of this week's work went into creating yet another 1.1.x release, as some layout glitches were found in the bigger list of fixes that went into Gecko 1.8.1.8 and a 1.8.1.9 was issued to fix those. Based on that, MoCo released Firefox 2.0.0.9 and we are releasing SeaMonkey 1.1.6 today to pull in the same fixes.
  I also created release notes for this and the previous 1.1.5 release, taking over from Chris, who unfortunately has less time to donate to the project.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  We spent some time starting internal discussions about possible organizational restructuring in the SeaMonkey project. After more than 3 years of existence of this project, some people's focus has shifted to being more or less active, and we need to think about how to reflect that in our organization. We need to keep the discussions a bit internal until we see this clearer ourselves, but expect to hear more from that soon (nothing bad, just the natural flow of things).
• Source L10n:
  I still haven't made my SeaMonkey L10n announcement, but with the new release out of the way, I hope I can do it soon now.
  I have done some work on CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks, and that even got a review from the ChatZilla side already, I hope to get the L10n review as well soon so we can move forward on this really soon now.
• German L10n:
  We should have Core trunk up-to-date again, right in time that FF3beta1 can ship even in German, and SeaMonkey trunk builds should be available in German again as well - with the usual known problems due to unfinished SeaMonkey2 work.
• Various Discussions:
  Feed discovery, link toolbar, browser notifications, toolbar customization, storage templates, dictionary licensing, auto-update system, etc.

Some people in the SeaMonkey community who were opposed to Firefox for a long time seem to realize that it is indeed a nice browser. I concur with that, but SeaMonkey is still much more than that: We offer a browser, mail and newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC client and web developer tools all in one application. While Firefox is a good choice for novices who only need a browser, I think SeaMonkey is still the better choice for advanced users, web developers and corporate users, and we're trying to make it fit those audiences even better in the 2.0 version, including some ideas and even more technology we can share with Firefox, but still making our software a distinct, different product with a long heritage and a hopefully even longer future.