Weekly Status Report, W30/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2010 (July 26 - August 1, 2010):

• Tabbed Browsing:
  The patch to default SeaMonkey to tabbed browsing could land without larger problems, though we still need to look into fixing some tests, as this switch has uncovered some wrong expectations of tests and a shutdown leak. Some of that has been figured out (e.g. I fixed one test bug), but not yet all of those cases. Also, about:* pages now load in the background, which is unintuitive and something we should fix.
  The patch for improving tab bar look needed some more work, but the second iteration looks good on Windows as well now.
  I also did some work on remembering site-specific zoom, but it needs some tabbrowser work (and fixing up mailnews) to actually perform its function correctly.
• "About SeaMonkey" Tab:
  Tired of waiting for a toolkit bug to be fixed, I finished up and landed our own version of about:, with the necessary privileges to link release notes and the SeaMonkey website, and with the possibility to be extended with other things provided in "About" windows in e.g. Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Doorhanger Notifications:
  After recent review comments and more patches landing in Firefox, I updated the doorhanger notifications patch, and also filed a bug and patch for using them for add-on web installation notifications. Reviews are ongoing, I hope we can resolve this as well soon, esp. the latter patch improves the experience with the new add-on manager significantly.
• Data Manager:
  Data Manager 1.0 could be released now - unfortunately, I did break the forget panel there and there are a few other glitches I found as well as some significant code rework.
  The reason I did find all that is that I submitted a patch for integration in SeaMonkey and review feedback proved to be quite helpful. Also, I finally sat down and wrote an automated browser-chrome test for almost all of its functionality (took almost all Sunday), so things like a broken forget panel will be detected in the future (and it uncovered a few small glitches while being written)!
  The install from AMO will be upgraded to a version 1.0.1 with all those improvements once I've worked through all the remaining review comments, updated the code for it and ported that to the add-on version.
  As a funny incident, the investigation of a performance issue finally led me to a recent regression in TraceMonkey that meant that sorting the lists in Data Manager is really slow when JavaScript is "optimized" in the buggy versions (with include Firefox 4 Beta 2 and current nightlies of both Firefox and SeaMonkey) but at least we caught this in time before it annoyed a larger number of users.
• Places:
  Places bookmarks are moving along! After ranting a bit and urging for reviews or otherwise getting it in for a3 in the SeaMonkey meeting, I did put up Ian as additional reviewer on all but core - and he definitely made a light appear at the end of the tunnel - now it's up to Neil to show me it's the actual opening or an oncoming train.
  Seriously, he's working on the reviews to the new places core, and with some luck, this all can land before the weekend and go out to testers in 2.1a3!
  If that's really to happen, it would lift a lot of weight off my shoulders and bring SeaMonkey bookmark handling fully up to par with Firefox, which would really be great. I hope we won't have too much fallout problems or regressions from this, but then, alphas and betas are there to get the required testing to fix those before shipping a final.
  I also created a shell script to diff ports against original files and submitted the script and the diffs to relevant bugs.
• German L10n:
  Micheal Opitz did some more help updates, which I landed for him.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, German L10n contributor meeting, security bug, user agent string changes, possible organization for SeaMonkey, L20n, NNTP and mailing lists and Thunderbird discussions, venkman and SeaMonkey 2.1, the road to libxul, watching Firefox's app tabs and Tab Candy work, etc.

This week has been another very active one, esp. for me - landing tabbed browsing defaults and then getting Data Manager into that state where it can be reviewed, following those review comments, and writing the test was already tremendous progress, but also seeing those places bookmarks reviews progress really made my week. If things continue this way, I'm really looking forward to handing a really exciting third alpha for 2.1 to those testers this month, as it will really show off that we are on the move!