Weekly Status Report, W03/2012

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2012 (January 16 - 22, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  The investigations of the Flash hang drop in Firefox 10 came out differently than what we liked - it looks like a UI change caused either people submitting fewer reports or sending of reports failing - in any case, we didn't improve code, but made us get less data to work with.
  After the last Socorro release and merging erroneous Java crash signatures into one, we finally got traction on the issue of properly reporting Java crashes and we'll have better signatures for them in the future.
  My custom reports for startup and per-device crashes are now working nicely (including weekly reports for devices) and listed on our CrashKill Reports page.
  Alerted people that the Banco do Brazil crash is back.
  Tried to get something moving on blocking Flash 10.0 but without success so far.
  Noticed that the growing amount of "ntdll.dll" crashes must be because of a symbol issue and pushed for getting that resolved.
  Alerted the Socorro team on timezone-related regressions and pushed for getting them resolved for the next update.
  And I helped the team with directions on what we'd like to see for a URL list for signatures.
  As usual, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Firefox cleanup:
  After a long time, I now don't just have reviews on some cleanup patches for search bar and engine manager, but also some time to actually work on getting them pushed. After some try runs, I saw that the former parts cause some problem with accessibility tests, so I only pushed the latter. Even though engine manager might get obsoleted soon, this should improve the code for 12 at least - and I still have one patch open to improve and hopefully also get in. And I need to investigate the test failures of the search bar stuff some more, but there's at least some progress.
• Web apps:
  I fixed a dumb bug in Lantea Maps and it now works fine with touch events.
• German L10n:
  I finally did the rest of the needed L10n for the Mozilla 11 core and SeaMonkey 2.8, uplifted it to l10n-aurora and then did some more trunk L10n.
  While at that, I also did run the script to split Fennec L10n for Android and XUL on both -aurora and -central trees.
  On the translation of the "Mozilla Spaces" page, I chimed in with a few comments.
  And I tried to help with another community member stepping in to localize the next version of Firefox.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  GC scheduling fixes, SeaMonkey build infrastructure, B2G browser, Fennec UA, binary components, BrowserID and L10n, my tablet being fixed and testing Fennec (XUL for now) on it again, etc.

One thing I noticed this week again wasn't just that I was able to quite productive in the end, but also that people from the community hired by Mozilla (as employees or contractors) often don't work in the same roles as they did before and therefore may end up having less time to still have that community stuff working as well as it should. Also, there's some question on how much you can engage with the community or try out other stuff in Mozilla when you work full-time on one part - and are passionate enough to also get some stuff done in what should be your free time, at times. Some localizations, add-ons, and similar projects have been feeling this in recent years and have a hard(er) time surviving due to it. After all, some people claim that "real life" isn't a myth but does exist somewhere out there and it might be an interesting quest to find out about that as well.
I think, with the kind of organization Mozilla is, we might want to think about maybe giving our staff some possibility even in their paid time to engage in the community in roles that are not strictly their work area. Of course, this can be a hairy topic, so all I'm saying is that we might want to think about that - it's far from sure that there is a good solution to be had there, but maybe there is. In the end, the community with its many aspects is what makes Mozilla great and enables us to create products like Firefox that make the life of millions of people better (yes, Firefox started as a fun side project as well, IIRC).