Weekly Status Report, W10/2012

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 10/2012 (March 5 - 11, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Improved the design and added some more verbosity in an info box on the Stability Dashboard.
  Got my correlation version update pulled into Socorro master to land with 2.5.1 right after the Firefox version updates land as well.
  Followed and took part in the Babylon library blocklisting issue, and was glad he could pull back from pushing on it when that company apparently fixed their product and crashes went down.
  Nervously followed and took part of discussions on the ongoing crashes with old graphics drivers until Benoit found a fix and we would be able to ship Firefox 11 with it.
  Was happy to see Socorro ElasticSearch infrastructure move forward.
  Could bring the revert of plugin hang timeout to conclusion.
  Discussed the state of Firefox 11 stability with CrashKill team members (and we saw it was good).
  Discussed the state of Camino on Socorro with their maintainer.
  As usual, continued watching new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Found the fix to my fix for the Data Manager test failure, requested review, and banged my head against my desk for the stupidity of the error I made in the first try.
  Continued discussing the data loss with POP3 filters while I stayed on beta build to not encounter it.
  Cheered for SeaMonkey project areas being updated.
  Reacted to a long-standing feedback request on Data Manager content blocker permissions and this turned into a patch I now have to review.
• Web apps:
  Made Lantea Maps look a bit nicer, esp. on phones, and improved performance a bit.
• German L10n:
  Landed the Firefox 11 strings patch by Archeopteryx more or less at the last moment, but we made it!
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Planet Mozilla rules and political views, SecureEmail, third-party add-on installs, 64bit Windows builds, B2G branding, B2G/Gaia UI consistency, permission/security model proposals, battery API, "HTML5" gaming, etc.

Yes, I'm running late again with this update. But it's release week and there's a lot of stuff to do. We just shipped Firefox 11 yesterday even though we first thought we might need to postpone it due to the graphics crashes I mention above, a security vulnerability found in Firefox 10 on Friday (which on Monday we found out had been fixed in 11 since the first beta) and Microsoft patch day (which was yesterday again and has burned us in the past so we are overly careful around it). We could overcome all those obstacles and still ship, though we'll only turn on automated updates tomorrow or so to be able to potentially react if the Microsoft updates don't cooperate well with us (looks good so far, though). Of course, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey also shipped updates - and we lifted our source up the channels and started to develop for Firefox 14 on Nightly. The trains all depart on time, every six weeks - and they are even quite punctual when they pull into the final destinations of releases. It's quite an interesting spectacle, and we seem to get the hang of it after doing it a number of times, and people now get more excited about "landing the patch early in the cycle" (to have a longer on-trunk testing phase) than "still making this train" (and reducing Nightly testing) which makes everyone way more relaxed. The system finally starts to work as it should. Now if we'd only get more people to run Aurora and Beta builds, which get the new features earlier, I'd be really happy (because we'd get better crash statistics and more chance to fix crashes before release, of course)!