Weekly Status Report, W44/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 44/2009 (October 26 - November 1, 2009):

• Releases:
  While I sat in a talk at the Cyber Liberties Conference here in Vienna on Tuesday, I performed the final steps for the big 2.0 release - web site updates and sending out the announcements. Downloads picked up fast and we should be around or over 100,000 of those less than a week later (I don't have good numbers due to disabling bouncer logs once again when database loads became high with Firefox 3.5.4 beings released as well).
  I'm reading and reacting to loads of feedback on the newsgroups, most seems good, esp. migrating from 1.x seems to have slightly rough edges though.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  The final 2.0 release sports 19 official languages plus an experimental Turkish version, and other locales have told me they are working on getting ready to join when we'll do a 2.0.1 in December.
  Two small patches could land to get dashboard ready to support both SeaMonkey branches (sea20x and sea21x) in the future.
  I added Simplified Chinese to our all-locales files, to hopefully have them in as one of those, increasing our world coverage a lot (oh, while we're at Asian languages, Japanese is aiming to join as well).
• Various Discussions:
  AMO and German dictionary, comm-central branching, ChatZilla move to hg, modal windows, dormant accounts, FF 3.5 -> 3.6 updates and SeaMonkey 2.x impact, Cyber Liberties Conference and Open Web track/talks, the twisted clearUserPref() story, Thunderbird 3.0 RC freeze, AMO compatibility center, etc.

The amount of posts in the SeaMonkey support newsgroup is almost mindboggling right now, and thanks to the team (thank you for supporting us!) are mixing with migration problem from 1.x, unclarities about changed feature sets, as well as other questions and problems.
The step from 1.x to 2.0 is rather large, we know that, and migration is something people don't test repeatedly, so it was clear we would run into a certain amount of problems there, that's just unavoidable. I'm pretty happy with the low amount of real bugs that have popped up so far, though I'd be happy if I would have the time to prepare an update parallel to the crash-fix Firefox 3.5.5 release that's upcoming late this or early next week - unfortunately, the slowness of our build machines, some time needed for community QA, and my vacation starting Saturday leaves too little time to do such a cycle in time and we'll need to wait with fixing those somewhat higher-profile crashes only in December in a 2.0.1 update.
I hope our users can do with what we have in 2.0 until then - and of course, we'll work on improving this product even further, with 2.0.* stability and security updates as well as a 2.1 development cycle and release next year.