Weekly Status Report, W31/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 31/2011 (August 1 - 7, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Continued the per-build crash rate calculations for 6.0 betas.
  My reports on Flash hangs go on and have been augmented by more long-time rate calculations, but I need to do even more work there.
  I took more looks into confirming that our recent hang fix worked, which looks good, but also looked into more Flash-related issues worth a look, one of which an Adobe developer says they should fix for a future version.
  Again, I stayed in close communication with the Socorro team on their ongoing work for better beta/release reports and numbers.
  Blogged about crash rates after a recent change in Socorro went live.
  On trunk, I kept track of some fixes for recent parser crashes actually working.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• Build System:
  Once again, I updated my patch for L10n-specific file removals on update, but I'm starting to give up hope that any of my mozilla-central patches will make it into the tree in foreseeable time - either my work is unwanted there or I'm to dumb to make it in a way that reviewers can swallow it. As I have more productive work to spend my time on as well, the motivation isn't really there to push on those much any more, in either case.
• German Planet:
  I pushed another design update done by Elchi3 live, thanks for the nice work!
  Also, I added Manuel Strehl to the aggregator, welcome to planet.mozilla.de!
• German L10n:
  I reviewed and pushed a number of small fixes to the German L10n overall, fixed some addressbook access keys (up to here affects all branches), updated DOM pieces of the L10n to current and renamed "Absturzmeldung" to "Absturzbericht" as that word matches better for crash reports that are not just notification-style but fully detailed reports.
  With that, quality of the German localization should be improved and all trees except Firefox and Fennec trunk (which don't lack much) are green for German now.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  SeaMonkey 2.3 feedback/discussions, more on B2G and Web APIs, the way of features from prototypes to production, devtools, MIME library work, new UI concepts, community metrics, MeeGo and Fennec builds, etc.

The next round of releases is coming up and I think we're in pretty reasonable shape for them - the new release process is starting to sink in everywhere and that should make it a positive experience for everyone, as delivering more deep-going fixed as well as new features is easier for everyone, and the 12 weeks of stability testing without major changes that every release gets should vastly improve the chances of shipping a rock-solid product on the release channel from day one. While our team was not completely happy with the level of crashes in Firefox 4 and pushed for a 4.0.1 to fix them, we have better chances to spot such things and get them fixed in the beta phase already and that pays off.
I like what I'm seeing at Mozilla nowadays, but we still need to become better on communication and working together with the broader community - still, even that is being worked on.