Weekly Status Report, W11/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 11/2009 (March 9 - 15, 2009):

• JS Performance & Debuggers:
  Wladimir Palant posted on his blog that just having installed a JS Debugger (venkman in this case, but ChromeBug behaves the same) has a perf impact on JS.
  This is because they need to init the JS debugging component from the startup of the app to catch all the loaded and running scripts even before their own UI comes up. It looks like this was only made visible now as before the incredible perf improvements done the JS engine devs this slowdown was less significant in percentage compared to running scripts, but with the current fast JS engine, this impact becomes visible.
  I filed a bug on removing that impact for normal SeaMonkey usage, investigation for which uncovered more bugs in the core JS debugging component, unfortunately. We are well into understanding the problems and discussing possible solutions right now. All this investigation will result in improving the situation for everyone, thanks to Wladimir for starting off all this and to Gijs from venkman for taking deeper looks into what's happening as well as thinking about solutions - and hopefully even patches coming up soon!
• Release Management:
  I moved forward with the release process for 1.1.15, now targeted for release on March 18, notifying localizers and preparing both the release directory as well as the web pages.
• Download Manager:
  Callek uploaded a new patch for switching to the toolkit download manager, which gave me the opportunity to test my new UI work the first time in actual SeaMonkey, and I found that it works fine!
  Unfortunately, I found a problem with importing download lists from the old implementation, thanks a lot to Frank, who helped in getting up a patch to make this work.
  Callek's patch contains stub versions of the per-download progress dialogs we will still offer in SeaMonkey, I did some work on creating full progress dialogs, which will see a large UI overhaul compared to the 1.x versions.
• Build System:
  I did some review and discussed the patch for pulling venkman from hg through our client.py checkout script.
  For build/release engineering, I reviewed a buildbot step abstraction done so that we can share more custom buildbot config code with Firefox, Thunderbird and others.
  When I did a just-fun-fun qt port SeaMonkey compile run once again, I spotted a compile failure in mailnews, probably related to missing printing support code in the qt port.
• Themes:
  I updated and released EarlyBlue and LCARStrek for SeaMonkey 2.0a3, both are already out of the sandbox on AMO and have more improvements than just keeping up with changes in SeaMonkey, e.g. they also should be much better in RTL support now (I didn't test that though as I don't know any RTL language) and support for DOM inspector and chatzilla has been updated to current releases after a long time of neglecting changes in those extensions.
• German L10n:
  Fixed missing about:sessionrestore strings, kept up with suite and chatzilla development, and switched to more common words for security messages. I also started a newsgroup discussion on the latter, might have more German string improvements to follow on that.
• Various Discussions:
  Multi-tab close dialog and session restore, MAOW Berlin, new build machines, wanted-seamonkey2 triage, www.mozilla.org redesign proposals, SeaMonkey website banners, 1.1.x support and mac machine issues, Firefox reversioning, HTML mail composing, etc.

I'm quite excited about the download manager stuff at this time, as it looks like we finally get in the position to drop one of the last pieces of old, unmaintained xpfe infrastructure and use well-maintained toolkit code instead, with our own UI on top of it, which is in the line of the old suite UI but with good improvements - and it's one of the largest pieces of UI/code that I have largely written myself, with assistance of MDC and XULPlanet as well as old xpfe and new toolkit code, but very little copy and paste.
In addition, once those patches are finished, reviewed and can be checked in, our L10n builds will become fully functional, which is another major milestone for SeaMonkey 2!