Weekly Status Report, W03/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2009 (January 12 - 18, 2009):

• Misc Development Work:
  I checked in the patch for an --enable-static --enable-tests compile failure and an automated test problem to the mozilla-central and 1.9.1 codebases.
  The improved throbber animation could also be checked in (to comm-central, of course) - it took me several hours though to blog about the process of creating those APNGs.
  We have been investigating an add-ons problem for some time this week, with some help of my memories and the original reporter, Mark finally found the problem and a fix.
• Password Manager:
  Finally, both SeaMonkey and Thunderbird switched away from old, unmaintained xpfe wallet code and adopted the toolkit LoginManager code instead, which we now share with Firefox, see Standard8's blog post for more details about the switch. The SeaMonkey-specific patches landed together with that work as well, that work by Neil, Serge and me should make people feel no real difference in terms of UI, except the switch away from modal dialogs and to browser notification bars for the "remember" prompts and autocomplete on the user fields in web forms instead of the modal dialog for filling in passwords when multiple logins are stored.
  I know a few very loud-voiced people like the modal dialogs better than the alternatives, but much more people like avoiding the modal dialogs better. The new UI, esp. for discovery/autofill of multiple saved passwords/accounts could be better (see the relevant bug), we know that. The fact is that keeping old code around without maintenance is worse in terms of stability and security than adopting maintained code with known flaws, but at least have someone work on the code. Patches for improving that code are not just welcome, but will likely even be reviewed by someone - something we couldn't guarantee for the old code.
• Places History:
  A change in the toolkit code for the matchOnlyTyped preference caused test failures and non-working UI, which I created a patch for. It got reviews, but I needed to wait until after the weekend for checkin.
  By the way, we realized that the autocomplete.enable pref doesn't work right now, but the toolkit code will be changed in a way that it will work again, along with the existing SeaMonkey UI, and Firefox UI will be changed to use it as well.
• Download Manager UI:
  Some more addressing of review comments for the new download manager UI, but more to be done here.
• German L10n:
  German SeaMonkey strings was updated for trunk checkins, including the above mentioned password manager code.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, test leaks, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, etc.

In this week's status meeting, we have decided to give SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 another week of development compared to the previous schedule, so that we can keep our code freeze in sync with Thunderbird. We will now take code changes for this last alpha until February 5 and hope to make builds, test them and get them out to the public soon afterwards. This won't change the schedule we have in mind for final as we only have rough dates even internally so far - and there's not much secrecy about what we have in mind: After this alpha, we're planning on only one beta before the final release so far, with about one and a half months of development/testing time between milestones, it's an easy guess where rough planning takes us. I stated previously that we target the second quarter of 2009 for the final release, I hope we really won't slip those rough schedules as far as to not make that - as you can calculate, we have some flexibility for this to still stay withing the range of that quarter.
This summer, we should have a stable toolkit-based SeaMonkey release for everyone out there!