Weekly Status Report, W30/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2011 (July 25 - 31, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Did more per-build crash rate calculations for 6.0 betas.
  Also ran more reports on paired Flash hang details, hoping that Adobe folks might profit from those.
  Continued investigation of our top Flash hang on Beta/Aurora/Nightly and followed the regression fix that was found and deployed, tracking its success.
  Continued talks with the Socorro team on getting better beta/release reports and numbers, which we need for the next Firefox release.
  Also tracked their efforts on getting a release shipped that fixes "crashes per user" numbers to include plugin and content crashes.
  Investigated a number of new or rising crashes while some members of our team were out of the office, also noted two issues of concern in 6.0b3.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build/Releases:
  I closed up the first round of providing updates for linux64 builds by putting up the snippets for also offering the 2.0.14->2.2 "major update".
• (Tahoe) Data Manager:
  My patch for support of bare IPv6 addresses that also makes other cases more problem-proof got reviews and approvals and I landed it for all branches, including beta, so it's in SeaMonkey 2.3b2 already.
  I continued work on website storage support, but the test is giving me headaches, so I only attached a preliminary patch.
  Still, I did post a new version 1.4 on AMO that includes all this work and should be a significant jump forward for the add-on.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Reviewed and approved some sign-offs both for aurora and beta localizations.
• German L10n:
  Synched up German L10n of SeaMonkey with recent trunk changes.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  More SeaMonkey 2.0.14->2.2 MU feedback, B2G, the way of features from prototypes to production, devtools, MIME library work, MeeGo and Fennec builds, etc.

The large topic this week was of course the B2G project which has been announced through newsgroups on Monday and I was called early on Tuesday to talk to a local media guy from "futurezone" about it - the resulting article (in German) contains comments from Mike Shaver, me, the announcements, and their opinions on it. In the end, I think this is a fantastic project for bringing web standards, including HTML, but also a number of other relatives, up to speed to gain the abilities to write really complete applications using them and to replace all apps usually needed on a tablet with them - from there, we can move to world domination for the web (or so).
Of course, a lot has to be done there, HTML needs to get good enough for real UI design, we need was to access more hardware functionality, but with proper security and privacy models, we need to improve offline support even more, make local and cloud services both equally usable for web apps, and probably more. Mozilla as the only non-profit player in the browser (or web application runtime) market is in the best position to work on those standards and implementations of them in a really open way that serves the user first, and that's why I think it's paramount that we play on this field.
The hardware and lower-level OS stack we start building prototypes with is only important right now in the sense of getting something to hack on and build this technology upon as fast as possible with as little work from our side as possible. Given that Mozilla has Tegras available in the office and a well-working Android browser, our team might as well kick off work based on those. Of course, I'd love us to use a more openness-friendly OS stack like MeeGo and a wider distribution of hardware in the future, but given the Mozilla codebase the whole work builds on, I'm sure that won't be a real problem, esp. if e.g. the MeeGo community helps out once code is there. Right now, the most important thing is to get code running as a prototype and the standards processes churning, everything else can be discussed later - we're far from even thinking about a mass-market or even small-market product in that effort anyhow. We can start on the the new web APIs right away, though, and that's one area Mozilla is already good at, so let's go for it and use that power to improve the web in an open way for everyone. That's what promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web is all about, right?