Weekly Status Report, W01/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2009 (December 29, 2008 - January 4, 2009):

• Places History:
  As we'll be using a different, new pref for telling places to only look at history for urlbar autocomplete, we also need to make test even more robust against different default prefs, which I created a patch for.
  Additionally, I also created a patch for adding UI prefs for places, including the change to that other default pref.
• Password Manager:
  I got new reviews on the patches for switching SeaMonkey to LoginManager, and Mark is nearing fully reviewed state for the (mailnews) backend switch, so expect SeaMonkey (and Thunderbird) to be throwing away wallet and also turn password management over to toolkit really soon now.
• Download Manager UI:
  As already mentioned in this blog, I did a lot of work on creating a tree-based manager window for the toolkit download manager so that SeaMonkey can have a download manager that is similar to its current one, but evolved into an even improved version, once the backend switchover has been done.
  Before the holidays, I had a rough proof-of-concept done, this week I involved it into an actually working download manager window with a good set of functionality, and in the end even produced a first patch on the newly filed bug for the new UI. Some small pieces may not yet be perfect when the first version lands, but it will already feature a number of improvements over the old one as well as having a familiar look and feel.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Venkman gained Polish L10n this week, and localized ChatZilla is now also available in Brazilian Portuguese SeaMonkey builds.
• German L10n:
  Updates a number of German SeaMonkey strings in both hg repositories, and also cleaned up superfluous newlines caused by a bug in my beautify_mt_output script used for transforming MozillaTranslator output into localized files that match en-US as closely as possible.
• Various Discussions:
  Temporary failures in automated tests, tabmail, feed preview, CA activities and policy modules, comm-central Bugzilla components, etc.

Sorry for being quite late with this update, going home and mostly offline for my dad's birthday early this week made me push out writing this up.

This year is still very young, but the list of things going on in SeaMonkey code is impressive: tabbed mail, a new password manager backend, a reworked and improved download manager, session restore, feed preview, and customizable toolbars for the browser all have patches up for review currently and we hope to get the majority of those into Alpha 3, the reworked history and urlbar autocomplete backend has already landed in time for that next milestone. It really seems like SeaMonkey 2 is finally taking shape - count on a final release this year (our target for it is in Q2/2009 currently)!

A Happy New Year from and with the SeaMonkey project!