Weekly Status Report, W46/2007

Another week has passed, and here's a short summary of the SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 46/2007 (November 12 - 18):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  I uploaded even more SeaMonkey 1.1.6 contributed builds.
• SeaMonkey Website:
  The new SeaMonkey Website has been improved in some small cases, and some errors of the switch have been ironed out throughout the week. It looks like everything works well, but we surely will continue to improve this website over the next weeks and months.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  Some more internal discussions in our core team around the SeaMonkey Council, hope to have decisions about this soon.
• Source L10n:
  Finally, source L10n for SeaMonkey is available now, and we added 2 languages last week and 3 more early this week, so that as of my writing, we have 6 localizations in addition to en-US generating build on trunk, including nightlies. Note that password manager, download manager and Windows integration are known to be broken on the localized builds, those will only work once we have new implementations for them and the respective dependencies of bug 286110 are solved.
  The process for CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks is clearing up, some discussions are still left open though, I hope to get more input this week.
• German L10n:
  Some more work to keep up with trunk, also corrected a few errors reported with German trunk SeaMonkey builds.
• Various Discussions:
  Send-mail crash, cert override UI, feed discovery and support, browser notifications, login manager, storage templates (went in finally!), dictionary licensing, auto-update system, etc.

I heard some concern about slow progress on SeaMonkey 2, and that's understandable from a user's point of view, as most users don't see the work that is happening right now for this future release. We hope we can provide an Alpha fairly soon (still no exact timeframe or requirements document for that) and from that preview, we will narrow down fixes until 2.0 final in a more visible pace, I think. Going from SeaMonkey 1.x to 2.0 is a very big step though, one that 2.5 years ago most people in the Mozilla project would not have believed we can even achieve in our new project. We have come a long way on this road and I'm pretty sure people will see the suite thrive with the changes we have done and are still doing in this development cycle. Just be patient a bit longer or backup your data and dare to test a quite experimental nightly builds, and you will see it's definitely worth the wait.
If you can do neither, read my recent Progress and help-wanted on SeaMonkey 2 post to get an impression of where we are going right at this moment. We are moving on, but we need some time to get this stable enough for regular use. Grant us that time and be rewarded with the best Internet suite ever produced.