Weekly Status Report, W19/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 19/2010 (May 10 - 16, 2010):

• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0.5 moved forward, I readied just about everything except finalization of the release notes this week. Due to more delays with shipping Firefox 3.6.4, that has most of the same security fixes (in addition to the new feature that delays things) and us not wanting to ship either unexplained security fixes or explaining vulnerabilities the Firefox hasn't shipped an update to, we are now in a waiting position and will release as soon as they are, current plan seems to be June 1.
  For SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 1, we are not dependent on any other release as it's not a security update but a feature preview. Builds have been done and tested somewhat, no major issues have been reported, so we are on track for going public, which will probably happen tomorrow. Everything should be ready except release notes and the announcement, which both still need to be finished or written up.
• Build (and Win7 integration discussion):
  I did a few build system reviews, and followed the discussion in a bug about startup crashes on updates that more and more came to the conclusion that some component registry caching files we are dynamically creating should be removed on every update, which I finally made a patch for and could land already.
  Additionally, I filed a bug on a Windows installer build failure that happened after some mozilla-central changes to better support the Win7 taskbar, and jimm as the author of the platform and Firefox patches jumped in immediately and provided fixes as well as filed a tracking bug for Win7 taskbar integration on our side. He's been very helpful, and we appreciate that a lot. He even implemented platform support for per-window-type IDs, which we can use to optimize how mail vs. browser windows are treated by Win7. Help from you in the community to actually fill the gaps in our own code to make it all work would be appreciated, he surely would be willing to help there!
• Context Menu:
  You might remember that I had been doing work on a context menu test earlier. In that work, I realized we have bookmarking entries in there which need to be adapted for my places work, and that in turn made me realize it would be good to have a reference to the browser element the menu is being opened on. When I tried to implement that, I saw how alien indentation and code style in the file were, so the patch turned into a major cleanup of this JS file. I updated it this week for some review comments and could land it in the end, hopefully making this code better to work with. I also filed some followups to further improve this code.
• Places:
  I successfully ported the de-XBLification of bookmarks menu and toolbar to my local work on places bookmarks this week, but I still need to split it up and merge the work into the correct patch set parts. I might wait for review on places history speedup on our side or readiness/landing of places transaction changes on the Firefox side before I'll attach new patches and generate new try builds, though.
• Various Discussions:
  The name of MailNews, Account Manager, Summit, tree/network issues, new add-ons manager, release delays and OOPP blockers, Weave Sync L10n, Ratty's commit access, buildbot version upgrade, Thunderbird mailing lists without newsgroup mirrors, stage/FTP cleaning policy, etc.

Some time ago, the Czech Mozilla team asked me to answer a few questions about SeaMonkey - now this interview with me has been published (also available in Czech) - apparently they picked my statement how a marketing team could improve SeaMonkey usage as a headline.

Also, even while the first alpha is only about the be released, a few interesting things are in the pipe for or already landed in 2.1-targeted nightlies, like the new addons manager (see teaser screenshot (that still has a few things to be ironed out), our version of the findbar, customization of the mail search toolbar and more. And with your help, this already incomplete list can even grow more!