Weekly Status Report, W25/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 25/2008 (June 16 - 22, 2008):

• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  Again, I spent quite some time refining my build setup and discussing Mercurial for SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, and calendar entered the scene as a possible additional project sharing this repository.
  Nothing has been decided yet, but a lot of things are out there to decide and we'll follow along.
  I also filed some bugs about fixes we probably need in Lightning independent of what repository calendar ends up in.
• Automated Testing:
  I filed a bug about the problem we have with xpfe autocomplete failing Mac tests.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  I've sent out mail to the Council and a number of active developers, and I got a few replies, a status meetings wiki page has been set up as well with a few pieces of information, something's definitely starting to get going here.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 Release:
  The release process is going forward, but there were a few last-minute security fixes in Gecko we needed to take, so we made a respin of the 1.1.10 candidates and rescheduled the release for July 1.
• Help Updates:
  I finally updated the patch for the helper applications help again.
• Various Discussions:
  Firefox 3 release and download day, session (re)store, toolbar customization, treelines, Thunderbird/mailnews development, mozilla-central/1.9.1, bidi support, etc.

While Firefox has neared and released a major new version with really great marketing and resulting download numbers, and Thunderbird development has picked up so they could release their first alpha and are preparing the next one, news have been a bit silent on the SeaMonkey side recently. When seeing what the collection of status item in the meeting agenda is revealing, I start to get more optimistic again and feeling that we are on the right track after all. We surely need all the help we can get, but I hope at least over the summer we can get to a stage where we can show off a first testing version of a finally toolkit-based Internet suite to the community, which will be a great milestone.

That said, we of course want to integrate some things that are new, try out how well some things developed for Firefox 3 can work for us and test some changed default settings. We will surely not going to ever include a clone of Firefox as our browser, but sometimes we'll introduce changes in an alpha just to see how a wider audience than the hardcore nightly users reacts. Please don't kill off efforts to do that before we have the chance to get such feedback. Oh, and if you know concrete things you like better in SeaMonkey than in Firefox, please let us know, preferably on the newsgroups / mailing lists - not that we want to fight our friend Firefox, but we want to know how we can target our niche of the market even better.