Weekly Status Report, W25/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 25/2011 (June 20 - 26, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Made instrumentation for finding out something that is nearer to the real crash rate of the 5.0 final build than what calculation on a single throttle rate could tell.
  Investigated how Socorro finds it crash rates to know what numbers of mine to compare to and saw how convoluted that code currently is.
  Looked at 5.0 crash data to see if anything sticks out.
  Attended the new Firefox release launch broadcast.
  Looked at my Flash hang reports and saw the trend I saw in the first reports go on. Will need to do further investigation there soon.
  More discussions on JS crashes, trying to work the JS team to get to instrumentation and fixes there.
  Met with the CrashKill team to discuss my proposals for Q3 priorities we see in Socorro work and forwarded that draft to the Socorro team.
  Engaged in discussions on a GC fix that should reduce Firefox memory usage and out-of-memory crashes, but has some risk for being fast-tracked into Aurora and Beta.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  Helped Callek to get 2.2 Betas moving forward.
  Checked in my patch for removing branch hacks from comm-central.
• SeaMonkey 2.1 UI:
  I had a number of discussions on SeaMonkey 2.1 code I worked on, including the new zoom backend support and Data Manager - bugs and ideas have been brought forward, other people might work on improvements to the work I started there, which is a good sign after all.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Worked on more L10n sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta, more and more locales are joining the train.
• German Mozilla Community:
  I pushed the new design for the German Planet Mozilla, as we now have mozilla.de in that new design as well.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  New Firefox process in the Enterprise (including the actual discussion this is mocking), Linux 3.0 Mozilla build bustage, more SeaMonkey 2.1 release feedback, MemShrink and memory reporting, user volume on Aurora and Beta, MeeGo N900 CE, N9/Harmattan announcement, Mozilla sponsorship for SotM-EU, getting SSL to run on a first domain on my own web server, etc.

A lot of things happened this week, including good and bad messaging in the press for Mozilla, as we held the promise to go for faster release cycles. There is a lot of hope, but also fear, uncertainty, and doubt out there, both in our community and the wider public. We need to address that, but I think we can. I'm excited about the new process because we have an unprecedented time of only stability and polish work on every release when they are in Aurora and even more in Beta stage, and we can really concentrate on doing good crash analysis and catching of nasty bugs there. For this release, we weren't yet confident to call it the most stable release of Firefox ever, but following this new process, we will soon be able to say that based on real data we have. I'm really looking forward to that and to being part of this great story.
And to everyone who still has fears, uncertainties and doubts about it, try to think about how you could embrace this new process of a lot of small steps and only after careful analysis and weighing against taking huge leaps with more time, where you are more prone to stumble when you finally move. Let's try to stay positive and think about how we can make things better on the base of what we have now instead of how a new thing could make some part of the world collapse. Let's stay positive and let's make this world more modern and replace doing revolutions after long times of stagnation with evolving more continuously instead. I believe that could help everyone