Weekly Status Report, W24/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2011 (June 13 - 19, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Looked at data of new 5.0 beta builds, but there was a problem with the update system so uptake was a bit slow. Still, the more users we have on beta, the better the data looks.
  Did run some investigation on hangs and Flash versions and preliminary could find that the 10.3 versions of Flash seem to be more prone to hang than older versions. This also would explain why 5.0 has a higher hang rate than 4.0.1, as users on beta are more likely to have newer Flash versions installed.
  Discussed JS PGO a lot, and even though I still am pretty sure it doesn't make us crashier, we'll probably end up turning it off on Aurora as well and first look into more GC and MethodJIT crash instrumentation before we flip that switch again.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  Proposed for us to go directly to 2.2 with major updates from 2.0 and therefore double up on pushing 2.2 out soon, Callek and others seem to agree.
  Helped getting aurora builds on track, among other things by updating the automated update system (AUS) server we use, so it recognizes by-channel settings.
  When I first made trunk updates going, I introduced a typo that broke updates but I solved that fast after it got reported.
  For 2.2b1, I helped getting the initial update config files in place so that we ship automated updates to all 2.1 (beta and final) users that are on the beta channel.
  On the build system side, I did a patch on removing the Mozilla-branch-based switches from comm-central.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Sent another message to the L10n list and accepted more L10n sign-offs for 2.2 beta, most locales we shipped in 2.1 seem to be on track to get into 2.2 as well - at least I hope to hear back soon from those that aren't accepted in yet.
• Themes:
  I spent a number of additional hours working, and finally, could update my personal theme page to have the new 2.1 versions of the EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes announced! Reviews on addons.mozilla.org are still pending, but I did upload them there as well - both work with SeaMonkey 2.1 and probably well enough with the newer versions as well, and in addition, LCARStrek now supports Firefox 4 (and probably newer ones) as well!
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Lists across multiple domains in Data Manager, hg precommit hooks for bug numbers in commit messages, update to Linux 3.0-rc kernels and seeing compile problems now due to that and a different bug, SeaMonkey 2.1 release feedback, MemShrink and memory reporting, errors and assertions, beta build turnaround speed, MeeGo N900 CE testing, sponsorship for SotM-EU, etc.

Things are moving fast in Mozilla land - while SeaMonkey just released 2.1 last week, we've been using that one to get "2.3a2" builds from aurora to work and update correctly and get ready for doing the first and potentially last beta for 2.2, which should go for a release within the next 2 weeks or so.

And Firefox is releasing 5.0 tomorrow! I'm excited to see how it does on crashes, as this is the first release on which I've been around in "Crash Scene Investigation" the whole cycle. So far we are looking good, but we still have way fewer users on Aurora and Beta than we would like to have for comprehensive pre-release crash analysis, so the first days of sending it out to users will give us a better picture. Given that changes compared to Firefox 4 are small and the beta numbers we have so far are looking really good, I expect this to be a smooth release in terms of stability - but I'm standing by to help figure things out in case that will not be the case.