The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 52/2008 (December 22 - 28, 2008):

• Releases:
  I continued uploading contributed SeaMonkey 1.1.14 builds as they came in.
• Automated Tests:
  Right before the holidays, I tried to make all SeaMonkey tinderbox columns green and fixed a SeaMonkey test failure by moving a test into Firefox-specific code as well marking the correct test parts "todo" in another test. That worked fine, but just as I checked in those, Marco from the places team checked in a patch that caused a different test to fail on SeaMonkey as we don't implement the "private browsing" feature on the product side (yet).
• Password Manager:
  Mark posted a new WIP patch for the switch of mailnews to the toolkit login manager, replacing the old, unmaintained xpfe wallet code that both Thunderbird and SeaMonkey still use for password management.
  Following up on that, I worked on dusting off and unbitrotting the SeaMonkey switchover patches we had waiting for some time. Things seems to be working fine locally, so expect the patches to appear on the bug soon.
• German L10n:
  Landed some updates for the German ChatZilla L10n in both hg repositories.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, tabmail and tabbrowser, etc.

I spent most of this week without a computer or Internet at all, during the holidays I didn't turn the laptop on in 4 complete days, with "only" 1.5 hours of checking email on a 5th day, so naturally I didn't get much stuff done for SeaMonkey. On the other hand, I could "recharge my batteries" having some fun time with my parents, brother and friends, so I should have even more energy for doing work now - I hope you all had a chance to regain energy this way as well.
And, adding to all the joy: Congratulations to our SeaMonkey team member Justin and his fiancée on having their first child!

After uploading a 2.0 Alpha 2 version of LCARStrek about 10 days ago, I now could also update my EarlyBlue theme for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 a few minutes ago, at the right time to hand them to the Mozilla community as Christmas presents.

On AMO, you need to log in to get those versions from the sandbox - alternatively, my KaiRo.at theme downloads page offers them without login.

As said before, the tri-licensed source of the themes is available from my public git repos.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 51/2008 (December 15 - 21, 2008):

• Misc Development:
  The removal of the "what's related" sidebar has been completed (it was probably mostly unused, had privacy implications, and unmaintained binary code). Everyone missing it should watch out for the Alexa sidebar add-on.
• Releases:
  We released SeaMonkey 1.1.14 on Tuesday. As we did the first build run a bit later than Firefox, we already did include the fix the Mozilla Corporation people "forgot" in some shipped 2.0.0.19 builds and so couldn't come in the problem of potentially shipping the wrong builds. 1.1.14 includes all fixes that are in Firefox 2.0.0.20, and there will be future 1.1.x security update releases, even though Firefox will not ship 2.x updates at the same time any more.
• Automated Tests:
  We had some test failures occurring on SeaMonkey lately, and a long-standing leak issue I had been thinking about off and on.
  As I "caused" one of the failures by enabling that test in SeaMonkey with the places patch, I tried to figure out was was going on with it and created a patch that moves it into Firefox-specific code as it uses features only supported there.
  Another test had been failing since it was introduced and what it tests doesn't even work on my local Firefox builds but somehow succeeds in their tinderboxes, not on SeaMonkey's though - it looks like opening documents in new windows isn't as clean as it should be. I created a fix that could go in and marked the test todo for SeaMonkey, but "unfortunately" it half-succeeds on Windows, so this isn't completely done yet.
  The long-standing EM RDF leak had been mitigated somewhat by a recent EM fix, and after Dave Townsend ("Mossop") reminded me that there was a JS workaround in the bug, I decided to clean that one up and worked it into a patch that removes the EM datasources on window unload, and the helped our leak reports quite a bit.
• Download Manager:
  We've been planning for some time to move to the toolkit download manager backend, but always wanted to keep a tree-based download window similar to what SeaMonkey 1.x has (which was one of the motivations for toolkit getting a nice way to plug custom UI onto their backend). I invested some time into trying how we can do that this week. I hope to have more progress soon, what I have currently is basically a very rough sample, more a proof of concept than a usable download manager.
• SeaMonkey Vision:
  As our current project goals wiki document becomes (out)dated and the main goal of "keep a suite which is similar from a user's perspective to Mozilla 1.7.x" is something we have achieved in the SeaMonkey 1.x release series and keeping the project alive, and even the "plan to move to toolkit/ for the sake of code maintenance" becomes reality with SeaMonkey 2, I had started a thread on longer-term SeaMonkey goals a while ago, with the prospect of forming a real vision for the project from the comments of the community.
  This week, I summarized the comments and later grouped what they were saying by topics. This will form the base of our future vision, for which I'll make a proposal to the SeaMonkey Council soon.
• German L10n:
  Mostly ongoing work to keep up with comm-central and 1.9.1 development.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, places prefs, Get All Messages, tabmail, fishcam, etc.

We're nearing the probably only few days in the year where many of us find some silence and time for some non-work activities with their family and friends. I wish everyone who is celebrating this week a very Merry Christmas and hope they'll have relaxing and peaceful holidays.
To everyone not celebrating this holiday (right now), I want to apologize for not responding as fast as usual this upcoming week - I need this time out myself to gather strength for the upcoming year, where we're planning on doing great things for SeaMonkey!

Well, almost.

The "open browser and close again" as well as the "open mail and close again" tests our (Linux) bloat test box is doing both reports 0 refcnt leaks now, even without the slight hack we had in there until today (not loading the EM RDF datasource and not populate the "View > Apply Theme" menu with actual themes).

And even the chrome mochitest suite reports "no leaks" on Linux and Windows.

Unfortunately, we somehow still leak 1112 bytes on Mac for those tests. For the plain mochitest suite, where we run much more tests, we report 8 bytes leaked on Windows and Linux, on Mac OS, we report those 8 plus the previously mentioned 1112, making up 1120 bytes total. And for the browser chrome mochitests, we leak 1112 bytes on Linux and Windows, and 1232 on Mac. Somehow this 1112 number is something we like - interestingly, we get it in those places where one non-browser window is open in addition to the standard browser window (the "hidden window" on Mac or the additional window for browser chrome tests), I wonder if that's somehow connected. Also, we're leaking the RDFServiceImpl and an InMemoryDataSource there, which could be an indication what to look for, I guess (unfortunately I don't know the code too well myself).

By the way, I just worked a long-standing workaround to our EM RDF datasource leak into an actual patch, removing the datasource in the unload handler of the browser window, the real fix would be in cycle collection though.

Oh, and have patches waiting for review to get the actual test failures on SeaMonkey machines out of the way and hopefully turn them green for the holidays.

Computer - start personal log, star... er, earth date December 18, 2008.

The Roddenberry website of her son's company reports that Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the often so-called "first lady of Star Trek", has passed away last morning.

As many other fans of the great Star Trek franchise, I connect many great memories to that woman. She wasn't just the wife of the man who invented this great and unprecedented Science Fiction "universe", she also was (so far) the first known first officer of the original Enterprise as "Number One", she was nurse Christine Chapel on the same Enterprise later on, she is THE computer voice of federation ships in the 24th and 25th century, and she also was Lwaxana Troi, mother of the Enterprise-D counselor and attracting disturbance of many male's lives in the universe (or so).

Majel was the only actor who appeared in some form on all five Star Trek series so far, as well as in a number of movies. We apparently will hear her voice one last time in the upcoming movie Star Trek.

I'm just one of a huge number of humble fans, but I believe to speak on behalf of the whole community of Star Trek fans when I say we'll miss Majel. She surely has made an impact, and for that, we all will remember her.

Computer - end log.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 50/2008 (December 8 - 14, 2008):

• Build System:
  My fixup to in-package directory names with "pretty" package names also made 1.9.1 now.
• Misc Development:
  I started to work on removing the "what's related" sidebar, which is probably mostly unused, has privacy implications, and unmaintained binary code. For everyone who still wants it, the version that one saw there is still available as the Alexa sidebar add-on.
• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 was released this week, I also did some more work for preparing 1.1.14, still targeted for December 16th.
• Places History:
  I landed some small cleanups for the places code I checked in the week before, and UI-reviewed the comeback of grouping in the history window Neil coded up along with further cleanup of code we imported from Firefox but didn't need in this form in our history-only view of places.
  Additionally, mork history is finally gone from the Mozilla trees now.
  Following our places landing, a few places tests were broken in SeaMonkey, I could find fixes for all but one test in that location, which has its own problems being located in places, but testing a toolkit feeds fix by using Firefox-specific feed code.
• L10n:
  We released 11 experimental langpacks for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2, thanks to the work of the L10n community. I still hope for being able to have fully localized builds some time soon.
• German L10n:
  I once again tried to keep up with current development to keep German L10n green.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, places prefs, Get All Messages, test failures, l10n.ini and 1.9.1, 2.0a2 feedback, planet, etc.

Things are really moving now in SeaMonkey 2.0 land, and the new version of the integrated Internet suite starts to take shape. If everything goes the way it looks to go right now, Alpha 3 should deliver a very good amount of interesting features and most of what we want to achieve for this version. Things like allowing resuming of downloads across sessions, smoother password managing, session restore, toolbar customization, or tabbed mail are all trying to join the reworked history and urlbar autocomplete as new features in the next alpha. I hope all of those and perhaps even more things can really make it there, so we can show off where the suite is going in the near future.

Yes, I'm watching NASA TV often enough by video stream that the mission of going "to the moon, Mars, and beyond" is hammered deeply enough into my head that anything with a "beyond" outlook reminds me of it.

As an IRC talk mentioned looking for speakers for a possible Mozilla event in Berlin, I was reminded of my previous post on 2009 talks and figured I shouldn't only contact the travel agency for booking a flight and hotel for FOSDEM (which is early in February this time!), but also make my talk plans more concrete.

I just just signed up on the FOSDEM 2009 session proposal with a talk title of "SeaMonkey 2 and the vision beyond", and I'm planning on not only presenting what SeaMonkey 2.0 has to offer, but also where the project is headed in the longer term, I hope to have a public version of the SeaMonkey vision by then.

For Linuxwochen in Vienna (April 2009), I'm planning to go more general and talk about something like "The Open Internet and Mozilla" or so (anyone having a better idea for the title?), presenting mainly on what we understand as the open Internet, why it is important, what our goals are, what we are doing ourselves to move all this forward, and what others can do for the open Internet. This includes the Mozilla Manifesto and probably the 2010 goals in some way, as well as some small peeks on our products and some way of challenges for the audience to be part of the movement. Maybe some ideas of the great Clay Shirky talk from the Web 2.0 Expo in April 2008 could help there as well.

This second talk is quite different from all I've ever done before, as it's not just about the work I've been in all the time, but I think I know all the topics quite well and it's what we really need to get out to the public, to those who are not yet in our community.

Any suggestions, tips, comments?

The second alpha release for the upcoming SeaMonkey 2 just hit the virtual shelves!

SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 is our first release shipping an RSS/Atom feed reader as well as feed detection in the browser (welcome to the 21st century!) as well as the new per-toolbar icon/text mode controls, TraceMonkey turned on by default, the reworked FAYT, the geolocation notification bar (no geolocation provider though), lots of other smaller fixes, and of course, everything that's new in the backend we share with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 and Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 1.

With a small echo effect to the post about the latter by fellow project manager David Ascher, I'm inclined to say that in some ways, this is a typical alpha: There's a ton of new patches in this release, large code and functionality changes, and surely a handful of rough edges that need some ironing out until we arrive at beta or even final phases of this release cycle.

Continuing that slight echo, however, in some other ways, it's far from a typical alpha: We have lots of reports from people who consider our current alpha builds more stable and usable than the stable SeaMonkey 1.1 series, esp. on Windows Vista, where the current 1.9.1-based code understands much better how to talk to the OS. The core is stable enough that the Firefox team released their second beta based on almost the same Mozilla platform code, and Thunderbird released a lot of the code we share in their first beta. We're a bit more conservative in naming, as we still have a significant list of larger changes we want to get into SeaMonkey 2, including places-based history, really customizable toolbars, session restore, new download and password manager implementations based on the new Mozilla platform toolkit instead of the old Mozilla suite implementations, just to name the major ones. Due to this list, the next release will be another alpha, but we might only do a single beta after that one, before finalizing SeaMonkey 2.

This is an untypical alpha for other reasons as well: Contrary to what other Mozilla projects usually do, we're shipping automated updates to users of Alpha 1, if only complete updates, as this is the first time we can test that mechanism in SeaMonkey at all. Additionally, we're releasing "experimental" language packs in 11 languages to get wider-spread testing of the localizations provided by our contributors before we will be able to ship localized binary builds as well in the future.

Even though this is a mere testing preview of what's to come, SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 is surely worth a try and a strong signal of how much alive the SeaMonkey project is!

Via dtenser's latest post I found an interesting word cloud webtool called Wordle, which created this image out of my current blog Atom feed:



Easy to see what I've been working on and thinking about recently, right?

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 49/2008 (December 1 - 7, 2008):

• Build System:
  I landed yet another build system sync patch and did a followup to the client.py branch switch so that it runs with python 2.6, which prohibits using a [default] section in any INI-format config file.
  My fixup to in-package directory names with "pretty" package names was landed in mozilla-central, but not 1.9.1 yet.
• Misc Development:
  The mailWidgets fork is completed now.
  The superfluous inclusion of global/skin is now gone from mozilla-central, I hope it will be approved for 1.9.1 soon as it makes grippies not appear on the new history window.
• Releases:
  I worked on both SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and 1.1.14 this week, tagging and creating candidate builds for both. While the former is expected to be released in the next few days, the latter is targeted for December 16th.
  I also filed and partially fixed a few bugs related to those releases, for bumping version numbers, bug flags and keywords, bouncer additions, etc.
  For the alpha, I needed to figure out how to use the automatic update system (AUS) for releases the first time, and decided we will only ship complete updates this time, as setting up partial update generation is too much work manually - we'll have that with the automated release harness in future releases. The complete updates from 2.0 Alpha 1 to Alpha 2 are prepared and tested for all 3 major platforms though.
• Places History:
  As already posted here, I worked on the last iterations of my patch for switching SeaMonkey history to places, addressing a number of further review comments, and removing more non-history parts of the UI files I ported from Firefox (we're keeping separate UI for history and bookmarks, even if we might switch to using places for the bookmarks backend one time - which hasn't happened yet). Finally, I landed that patch on Sunday and enabled that new backend for everyone, including the new "awesome" location bar autocomplete algorithm and increased amounts of stored history.
  During development and after checkin, I filed a couple of followup bugs on cleanups, bugs, problems and further work. Oh, and I did a patch for removing the xpfe mork history, finally.
• L10n:
  I followed up on SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and L10n, now 11 language packs are repackaged, roughly tested (i.e. they bring up localized and usable browser, navigator, add-ons and preferences windows) and will appear as experimental language packs for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2. Thanks to our localization community for providing the work to make this possible!
• German L10n:
  The de locale was kept up-to-date both for the Alpha 2 release as well as the following changes in strings, including the places landing.
• Various Discussions:
  1.9.1 branch switching, UI changes from 1.x to 2.0, refreshing debug/QA menus, toolbar customization, mailnews de-rdf, APNG throbber, Get All Messages, incubator repositories module, de L10n of Mozilla brochure and manifesto, etc.

It's great to see SeaMonkey finally using places as the history backend, meaning less of that strange, Mozilla-only "mork" database format and more of the widely used SQLite database format in the backend, usage of less barely maintained xpfe code and more well-maintained, shared toolkit code, and some great new features for the location bar's autocomplete search as well as the ability to store more history data with less memory usage and no decrease in performance. This code change needs some time of testing in the development builds and nightlies and probably some followup fixes and improvements before it can get make its way even into Alpha 3, but it's a good step forward towards SeaMonkey 2.
Before that, we're about to release Alpha 2 this upcoming week, which doesn't contain that code yet, but debuts finer-grained control over toolbar icons and text (only in the browser and the main mail windows, for now) as well as a feed reader in the mail component and numerous other changes, like the toolkit-based find as you type and a large list of Mozilla core improvements we share with the other Mozilla-based products, including Firefox 3.1 as the front-runner in the family.
This is really a good time for being a part of the SeaMonkey project.

As I mentioned before, I've been working on places history UI for some time now to finish up the switch of SeaMonkey trunk to places on the history side of things. (No, we're not changing anything related to bookmarks at this stage!)

After a few iterations of the patch, we've now arrived at a stage where we decided to land it in trunk - the point of time after alpha 2 and early in the alpha 3 cycle is carefully decided, as we know it's a large change and the current state is not perfect yet. It also needs a good amount of testing and feedback before before releasing it on a wider audience, esp. since it touches a core feature of the browser.

So, what does that mean for a user of SeaMonkey nightlies or self-compiled trunk builds? Here are the main differences between the old and new history implementations:

New features:

• More intelligent algorithm to search and list items in the location bar dropdown, including search in titles and in the middle of URL/title strings
• Not keeping all history loaded in memory (less memory needed)
• Information stored in a SQLite relational database on disk instead of the clumsy mork database format used previously
• Storing more history (180 days instead of 9 days by default) without performance decrease or memory increase
• Can sort the history manager on columns not displayed
• Can search sidebar and manager inline with a search bar
• Can change the grouping in the sidebar
• Hovering the history sidebar updates the status bar

Unchanged features (among others):

• No bookmarks included in location bar searches
• No combined history and bookmarks window
• Bookmarks storage and management is completely unchanged
• Location bar dropdown stays in the same layout as before, with one item per line

Missing features:

• Can't group the history manager
• History sidebar only shows the title (you can't pick or sort columns)
• Open Link in New Window/Bookmark only appears when one link is selected
• Can't delete all history from a site or domain
• No First Visited, Hostname (minor) or Referrer columns
• No Select All context menuitem (minor)
• History manager hover doesn't update the status bar

Some of those missing features will be implemented with patches following up on the big landing done right now - we hope to get things like grouping in the history window even before alpha 3. We also will be adding a few UI preferences based on this work, esp. for tweaking how the location bar search algorithm works - the new code gives us some possibilities there but we didn't stuff this into the current patch to not make it even larger than it is now.

If you're not too fond of what you heard about the location bar search algorithm (which is basically the same as used by Firefox 3), please give it a try for at least a week of daily browsing, it learns from what entries in the search results you actually choose to load, and you won't see its full extent unless you give it this possibility to learn how important which sites are to you.

I hope that in the end, the increased amount of history stored and the improved search capabilities will enhance our users' browsing experience as much as it will delight anyone who has had the misfortune to read the source of the mork history.

The SeaMonkey throbber image, a rounded animated image of bubbles rising up in front of the SeaMonkey logo, is still a GIF, even on trunk. Therefore, it doesn't look too good on the non-alpha-transparent rounded borders when using a dark background, like here:



(This is showing the still version, which is just a non-animated copy of the first frame of the animation, so that the transition to the real animation is smooth.)

I've meant to look into this for quite some time, and now, a bug was filed for this (the image above is a screenshot attached there), so I came to think about it once again.

The obvious alternative is to use an APNG image, which is supported since Gecko 1.9, see this article about better animations (also using a throbber as an example, btw).

But here comes the problem: Even though APNG now has a project website and apparently even an APNG campaign, we still don't have a lot of tools I could use to create our animated throbber. The list of applications that work with APNGs isn't very long, the four application apparently capable of editing APNGs are two closed-source Windows/Java apps and two add-ons, one for another Java app I don't have and one for Firefox 3.
Apart from all those just being animation assembly apps and not image editors, I can't use any of them in my usual workflow, I don't even have Firefox 3 installed, I just have SeaMonkey trunk and Minefield trunk. The latter might work for dolske's APNG Edit Add-On, the former doesn't, as I saw when even trying with an install.rdf hack and a slight overlay change last time I tried (which was some time ago, when it was still pretty new).

Now I have been through all this discussion around MNG and animated alpha-transparent images that lead to the creation of APNG, and yes, MNG is probably an ugly spec while APNG is right to the point of what we want, sure. But this continuing lack of tools doesn't help. I'm usually doing all my imagery design with the GIMP, and this as well as a large number of others support saving animated GIFs as well as MNGs but no sign of APNG there (not even in the very current 2.6 version I have here).
So if I even get this Firefox Add-On to run that seems to be the "best" option, I need to create single PNG frames with the GIMP, assemble them with the Add-Ons, test them, go back to the GIMP for adjustments, re-import the changed frames with the Add-Ons, and redo those steps until it works. Not the ideal way to do things.

I just hope this format gets adopted by major editors or I fear all we'll have in our Mozilla source will be a format that is even more dead than MNG - which is clearly not what we wanted. Let's see if I can get that throbber done at least - I don't even know if I have anything better than those GIF frames as originals, so I might need some amount of heavy tweaking there.

We have built a first candidate build for the SeaMonkey 2.0a2 release, which is available at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/nightly/2.0a2-candidates/build1/ as of now.

Please help us testing that build by downloading a package for your platform and running smoketests on it.

Once we have completed smoketests on all three platforms without any major problems, we will be able to make this Alpha public (I hope this will be some time next week).

We might need some testing for automatic updates once we're nearing or doing the release, I haven't figured out all the partial update magic and how to do testing etc. yet, though.

Thanks for your help!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 48/2008 (November 24 - 30, 2008):

• Build System:
  The L10n Makefile restructuring for all three comm-central apps landed, as well as a fix for the zip and MAR breakage caused by that restructuring, which was partly my oversight (zip part) and partly ported (MAR/update stuff). The latter also needed a L10n buildbot change, but the whole generation of localized update files is nicer code now.
  When the Mozilla build team reported that the directory name of Firefox 3.1b2 builds wrongly was uppercased inside the zip and .tar.bz2 packages, I created another patch for this in the prettyname bug.
• Misc Development:
  After another Thunderbird header view change caused the SeaMonkey mail window to break heavily, I discussed the matter with SeaMonkey and Thunderbird developers and came up with a patch to fork the XBL for the header view widgets, reverting the SeaMonkey part to pre-TB-patch state and fixing our side. Later I came up with the Thunderbird side of the fork, but that one is still awaiting review.
  I also fixed up the icons in the Mac Modern task menu which looked garbled due to not supporting -moz-image-region.
• Release Management:
  We froze comm-central for Thunderbird 3.0b1 and SeaMonkey 2.0a2 on Tuesday, and subsequently I handled a number of approvals and tried to get things moving on the last blockers. We should be fairly close to relbranching and tagging now and hopefully should have candidate builds for Alpha 2 soon.
• Websites:
  Finally, the long-going chapter of obsolete L10n docs on www.mozilla.org could be closed by just removing the complete directory of old MLP pages from there. There is an archive page for getting the historical content, and current docs are on MDC and the Mozilla wiki.
  The 1.1.13 relnotes got a bit of an overhaul, removing the link to old Mozilla 1.x end user docs and including the content from there in the SeaMonkey site.
  Answering a request in a bug report, I also created screenshot pages for SeaMonkey 1.1 and SeaMonkey 2, those still need better linking though.
• L10n:
  I posted in the L10n group/list about SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and L10n, announcing that we'll have experimental language packs once again, but no localized builds.
• Various Discussions:
  Details of 1.9.1 branching, UI changes from 1.x to 2.0, EV UI, new cert error page, toolbar customization, mailnews de-rdf, help viewer, etc.

Alpha 2 should be pretty much wrapped up, and I think it will be another good milestone to show people and to get some testing on. Watch the newsgroups for a request to test the candidate builds!