Weekly Status Report, W43/2011

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 43/2011 (October 24 - 30, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Improved the per-component crash reports even some more, they should be really usable now, esp. as I included some visual improvements as well. I also filed a bug to get those reports integrated into Socorro at some point.
  Continued to give feedback on UI work for new reports in Socorro that are upcoming.
  Updated numbers on the categorized Socorro bug lists and weeded out resolved bugs from them.
  Joined the discussion of how we should/can use and deal with WinQual crash/hang data.
  As usual, I also watched new/rising crashes closely and filed bugs for a couple of those.
• SeaMonkey build&release:
  Helped Callek slightly with getting the SeaMonkey buildmaster up and running everything again after our VM host failure (mainly did some debugging and fixing on clobberer).
  Also updated the community update server to current AUS2 trunk code so we can handle extended snippet data in the future.
• Add-ons:
  Put some more work into cleanups of my Mandelbrot add-on and implemented a "Back" function in the Location menu. With that, I uploaded it as the final 4.0 version, it's now waiting for reviews.
• German L10n:
  I update DOM Inspector to current trunk, as well as dom/ and suite/ localizations on -central.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  "Native UI" for Firefox on Android, DST switches, status of releases, groups for mozillians, replacing my faulty tablet, N9 prices and availability, etc.

The landscape of accessing the web has changed a lot in the last years. What we call a "browser" isn't really what that words any more. Nicholas says "a web browser can be characterized as a JavaScript execution environment that happens to have some multimedia capabilities", and I'm trying to refer to Firefox being a "web application runtime" where I can nowadays. While it still happens to support browsing through classic web pages, most of its capabilities, innovations and our work are going into making real applications on the web work as smoothly as possible - and a number of websites people visit are more applications than simple documents nowadays, be it GMail, Facebook, even a number of news sources or other websites that under wraps run complex JavaScript code.
Now there's even stories going around about decoding video completely in JavaScript in a web page! And there's more, with us working on device APIs for the web and ultimately on run device UIs as web apps. This is really a different landscape than in 1998, when Mozilla started.
And even back then, some pioneers in this project had the futuristic vision that application UIs could be done with basically the same technologies as the web - just that HTML itself wasn't ready for it and they created XML-based XUL to do that job, coupled with slightly extended CSS and JS this became a very successful model, as all of the current Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and other application UIs are running on that right now. Over the years, a lot of the experience we had doing that could be brought back into the CSS, ECMAScript and even HTML standards so that we are close (but not completely there yet) to driving first-class UI on top of the Open Web. A lot has changed for sure, more is to do there.
As I said last week though, I'm sad a lot of that is being abandoned for our Android versions in the future. I hope enough people in the community will maintain and develop a cross-platform markup-based UI so that we sustain the flexibility to have a mobile Firefox on different platforms than Android - and of course, I hope we'll develop standard HTML to fill the gaps to XUL in terms of UI design, so that B2G-based devices in our future will really rock.
With those two measures, we can make open technology on mobile devices have a chance - with Mozilla power heavily involved!