Weekly Status Report, W42/2011

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 42/2011 (October 17 - 23, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Did some more improvements on the filters for per-component crash reports.
  Exchanged emails with Jesse on his stack-blame scripts and ended up filing a bug on making them an on-demand web service.
  Worked with the Socorro team to get a problem fixed that some crash aggregation got stuck over the weekend.
  I also gave some feedback on planned patches for Socorro so that the end result should be really helpful to us.
  As usual, I also watched new/rising crashes closely and filed bugs for a couple of those.
• SeaMonkey build&release:
  Followed all the news on the main SeaMonkey VM host going down, but not much for me to do there, Callek and the Mozilla IT team have things as much under control as possible under the circumstances.
• Themes:
  I did some more work on my themes and finally uploaded 2.4 versions of both EarlyBlue and LCARStrek which are awaiting reviews now.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  "Native UI" for Firefox on Android, how/where to land experimental features, background update work, my tablet being faulty, N9 prices and availability, etc.

The sad story how Mozilla might let go of the superior web-style-markup-based add-on system on Android devices in the future to be more easily competitive on performance shows me once more what sorry state mobile devices are in right now and why we badly need B2G be successful soon and graduate from an experiment to a full-fledged product as soon as humanly possible. In my eyes, Mozilla's mission requires us to use as open as possible and as "webby" as possible technologies wherever we can, and turning away from Gecko-rendered UI back to the (IHMO) stone age of using OS-native UI is not just against that but also against innovation. And while I see the arguments of why Android phones right now seem to need this, I don't like it - and I don't see any reason to even think about doing the same on tablets. I just hope I'll never need to use that "native UI", but then I surely won't buy and Android phone anyhow - but probably use an Android tablet until I can switch to B2G. Making the whole user-facing stack be driven by the web renderer is a real Mozilla way to go, using Open Web technologies from the bottom up, being innovative, creating new opportunities. That's what I signed up for with putting my time into the project, and that's what I want to see succeed. If you're looking for that spirit, please help the B2G project and help to make it succeed and make mobile devices a better, more open, more people-friendly place!