Weekly Status Report, W29/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 29/2011 (July 18 - 24, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Continued per-build crash rate calculations for 6.0 betas.
  Moved Q3 priorities to a place that reflects them being official.
  Created reports on paired Flash hangs with how they are spread across Flash releases, so we shed some more light on things the Adobe people can work on.
  I also did quite some investigation of our top Flash hang on Beta/Aurora/Nightly, which comes up way too high in numbers, and I seemingly could track it down to a regression window in our own code, I hope we can find some solution before shipping the next Firefox release.
  Talked with the Socorro team on their plans to get better beta/release reports for us as well as what numbers there should be on the front page in the future.
  Kept myself informed on potential things that Apple's Lion release could bring to the light.
  Filed a bug on future Aurora/Nightly reports changes.
  Of course, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats - now for Fennec 5 as well as several Firefox versions.
• Data Manager:
  After some more discussions, did a patch for support of bare IPv6 addresses with some additions that also fixes potentially different but similar problems. I hope this can even still land for SeaMonkey 2.3 in the current beta cycle.
  I also worked on website storage support, but I didn't get around yet to finish a good test for that, so people still need to wait for an official patch and add-on update.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  SeaMonkey 2.0.14->2.2 Major Update, feedback from that MU, live bookmarks, Firefox developer tools, marketing messages, BrowserID, shuttle era ending, MeeGo, etc.

I'm pretty excited about BrowserID hitting the public now. We really need to work on making identity handling better for users (think fewer problems with remembering, forgetting and hacking passwords), but need to do it in a way that's easy to grasp for users (not confusing URLs like OpenID), decentralized (not like Facebook Connect or Google login everywhere), but also easy to implement for website so they adopt it reasonably. And it should be integrate-able into browsers so chances of spoofing are reduced and your browser can be your single-sign-on solution (if you like). The proposed BrowserID should provide all that, and probably more - and we're of course open for feedback to make this even better, we always are here at Mozilla. I really hope this solution or something coming from it will take off. We really need that on today's web.

We also need solutions for enabling web apps to be as good as traditional applications, for those to be delivered to people in some kind of collection/store/market or whatever you call it, and all that in open and decentralized ways - and Mozilla will work on all that and more with our spirit of following a mission of openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.

And meanwhile, I'll try to help making Firefox and other Mozilla software more stable, and I think that's also going well so far - but we need to get even better, as does the web as a whole, and that's what I'm working for.