Weekly Status Report, W48/2011

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 48/2011 (November 28 - December 4, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Contributed to the discussion of where we were with chromehangs and filed the bug to disable the hang monitor for now.
  Got the ball rolling on and stayed in the middle of getting a long-term solution to having different crash-stats reports between Fennec XUL and "native" Android UIs. We have a solution now and are working on implementing it. Thanks to Laura for her game-changing idea.
  Filed a bug to make the Socorro graphs make more sense with zero values.
  Investigated some followup work needed to do for signature summary.
  Did some crash regression bug triage with Sheila and Marcia.
  Continued to watch new/rising crashes closely, filing bugs where needed.
• Themes:
  Did the rest of the porting of Firefox 9 changes to LCARStrek, so both EarlyBlue and LCARStrek 2.6 are basically done and only need some testing before I can send them to AMO.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  SeaMonkey machines, data stores for "native" Fennec, MXR future, ESR plans, Windows update service, L10n and string typo fixes, Mac OS X 10.5 support, Mozillians "phonebook", tablet hardware problems again, enjoying my Nokia N9, etc.

Just as the last month of 2011 is starting, some discussion and press seems to go out there how this year has been a bad one for Mozilla, but while the media tries to paint the sky black, it looks quite different here inside the project.
It certainly has been and continues to be a year where we face great challenges, but because of that, we have been seeding a few quite great things - delivering new features, performance and memory saving to Firefox users a lot faster than before, a web app framework getting created (at Mozilla Labs) that is open and able to grow to a cross-vendor standard, a web identity mechanism (currently dubbed "BrowserID") coming together that puts users more in control of their logins than before and makes life easier for web developers at the same time, growing a new version of Firefox for Android that is really fast and works smoothly, working on solutions for large deployments (or "Enterprises") again in an own working group, starting work on an open, flexible and fully web-based mobile stack (currently dubbed "B2G") and new standards needed there in the form of the WebAPI project, and much more.
There's surely fallout and a year where a lot of really new stuff is being created usually produces some kind of bottleneck in finished products to show off, so it's no wonder that this one isn't too different. Also, large products in open projects of course have some fallout in terms of discussions, concerns, unclear communications, and slight course corrections along the way. Still, the seeds are sown and great results will grow from them - I'm sure that our awesome community, including paid staff, can take care of those young sprouts in a way that makes them grow into great products.
And then there is the simple fact that the web is a competitive market again, which to a large part is our achievement, and we should be proud of that, but at the same time work hard to stay relevant in that market so we can influence it enough to keep it open for everyone. If the web stays one of openness, opportunity and innovation, we win. If we can help to make the user be more in control of his/her online life, we win. If everyone can put up his/her contents in the way (s)he likes, we win.
Mozilla is the only non-profit in this market and we have an awesome community, so I know we can win. And with your help, we will.