The roads I take...

It's been some time since I blogged lat about SeaMonkey statistics, and as the bouncer download data feed is hosed once again but we have two betas out, I was interested myself in some numbers of how we are doing.

Daniel Einspanjer from the Mozilla Metrics team was friendly and sent me some data he could gather from their systems last week (he says he'd be glad if someone from the community with webdev knowledge would come up to help making a public interface for such data - a blog post from him will come soon).

So, let's look at some graphs:


The first one depicts SeaMonkey downloads through downloads.mozilla.org in 2009 so far, excluding auto-update downloads for 2.x versions - blue areas are 1.1.x, green areas are 2.0 alpha/beta.
Of course, the stable 1.1.x ranks much higher than the 2.0 alpha/beta versions, and both naturally show spikes on release days. It's interesting that we got about the same number of 2.0 beta 2 on release day as for beta 1, esp. in the light that automated updates don't show up here, so that's new installations usually. Also, the daily level after the release spike is significantly higher for the betas than for the alphas, which is probably expect but nice to see here as well.
As a note, the 1.1.16 downloads visible in the graph sum up to about 380,000 total, 1.1.17 to about 340,000 - both are only for the main en-US downloads, no localized versions counted for 1.1.x - contrary to 2.0 betas, where localized downloads are also counted now.



The second graph shows daily users as estimated from add-on blocklist pings. As only SeaMonkey 2.x support the new add-ons system, the data can only take those into account here, we don't have this data for 1.x. Blue areas are official alpha/beta releases, turquoise areas are nightlies or self-built 1.9.1-based versions (with a -pre identifier), the green area is experimental mozilla-central-based 2.1a1pre self-built or nightly builds.
The graph shows that we have a stable pool of somewhat under 1000 nightly users, they probably hit their highest point at the end of the alpha period and decreased slightly with betas - looks like some people found the betas more usable than the nightlies after all.
We had a continuously rising user base all the year, though growth almost stagnated during summer in the late alpha 3 period - only to start a significant steady increase once the first beta hit the public. That increase still goes on today, hitting over 5600 daily users on Sep 22 and 23, the last two days in this data set, over 3800 of those users are on 2.0 beta 2.
And remember, all this is daily users on prereleases, as we don't have a stable version with support for add-on blocklists yet.



Finally, here's a look at what percentage of those daily users are on what locales, for both betas (which were the first versions shipped in multiple languages).
The huge blue chunk is US English, of course, accounting for slightly over 2/3 of our users on those versions. A comparison with Firefox numbers suggests that this would decrease as we add more locales in the future. The largest localization is German (green) with about 17% of our user base, followed by Russian (pink) with roughly 6-7%. In beta 1, Czech (yellow) had 3% - losing it for beta 2 was somewhat unfortunate for that reason, we sincerely hope it will be back for RCs and final! Polish (red) and French (light green) are used by about 2% of our users, and European Spanish by about 1%, all others have lower usage. I hope we'll add a few locales in the future that will show up with potentially high numbers. Still, this data is all for betas, but interesting nevertheless.

I hope those statistics give you a good look into what's going on with SeaMonkey in terms of downloads and users. I think we are on a good way with 2.0, and I'm surely looking forward to seeing how a final 2.0 will hit the road and those statistics!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 38/2009 (September 14 - 20, 2009):

• Releases:
  Good parts of my time this week were spent in release driving work - triaging the rest of the blocking and wanted flag requests (mostly ones where Ian and/or me were unsure what to do in the past), approving fixes we can still take for 2.0, and trying to poke people to get the remaining blockers fixed and the wanted bugs resolved where possible.
  We're down to 7 blockers and two requests made by me now, one of which probably has been rendered bogus as it now has an approved fix. Open wanted bugs are at 27 now, but a number of them don't need to be fixed, even though they would be nice to have. At the same time, fixed bugs since 2.0b2 are up at 76, which is quite a lot for two weeks in the SeaMonkey world and really nice to see!
• Build Machines:
  I did shut down buildbot on our Tiger test box as it has started to become somewhat unreliable recently and we have Leopard coverage in any case.
• Lightning Support:
  As we have tabmail in 2.0b2, we could support Lightning in principle with that milestone, but found out that Lightning nightlies won't claim they are compatible with it. So I filed a patch to make the minimum SeaMonkey version accepted by Lightning 1.0pre always to be 2.0b2 for now.
  A blog post on this seened useful, as people started commenting about 2.0b2 and Lightning in my older entry on the general matter.
  I also filed bugs on the two major issues we've been still seeing there, missing pref UI and an error with the invitation UI - both of which have been fixed within this week, either on SeaMonkey or on Lightning, so nightlies on both should work pretty well together now.
• Small Fixes:
  I fixed AMO URLs that had broken certificates - this unfortunately has an impact on all localizations without being able to change a string ID, so I posted on the L10n list/group about it.
  A small NSS packaging fix also keeps us working with the NSS update that has happened on the platform.
• Default Theme Icons:
  The bug about a new icon set for the default theme has stalled for a long time after the main toolbars of all applications as well as the smaller MailNews icons had been done. To get things moving again, I posted a list of icons that are still unchanged from the old set in the bug and I did a patch for the task icons that appear in the component bar at the left bottom of the windows and in the Window menu.
  More help on the rest of the missing buttons is badly wanted, this is work that only needs design knowledge, not code knowledge!
• Website Work:
  An update to our documentation on location-aware browsing (geolocation) has long been overdue, and I was reminded of this on IRC, I went and did that work now, making our info page fit with its Firefox equivalent. As that page links a SeaMonkey privacy policy, which we didn't have so far, I also created that, seeding it with Firefox's policy and fitting it to our needs. It sounded logical to put this into a new legal resources section on our website.
• German L10n:
  I added another round of fixes for the latest SeaMonkey code changes.
• Various Discussions:
  2.0b2 feedback, EnigMail support, NSS initialization on 1.1.18, gloda test failures, comm-central permissions, comm-central branching, SeaMonkey testday, Thunderbird UI changes, AMO process and reviews, Mozilla Camp Europe, OpenWebCamp Vienna, talk about Mozilla at a FOSS event in Vienna, etc.

I'm starting to feel the strain of the release driving I'm doing right now and the pressure I put on myself due to being so eager for this release to finally happen and be really good.
On the other hand, I've created a counter on my default home page that counts down to the takeoff for my vacation in about 46 days and 14 hours from now - and I have bought our tickets for the Thanksgiving game in Cowboys Stadium in Dallas! Since I saw that new stadium on TV yesterday I definitely know that those tickets are worth the money - I guess it will be pretty much sold out that day, and that means a crowd of over 100,000 people there! This will be pretty awesome! I just hope the Raiders will play a defense as good as yesterday, then we'll also see an interesting game down there on the field, which should complete a hopefully very memorable day...

Before that, there's still work to do though, so that SeaMonkey 2.0 will be a pretty damn good release.

I've seen a stream of new comments on my older SeaMonkey and Lightning Calendar" post, so I think I should provide you with a bit of an insight of where we are with this now - after all the official SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 announcement mentions Lightning.

The good news is that you actually can install current Lightning 1.0pre nightlies in SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and above and you will get a lot of calendaring functionality right in your suite install.

The bad news is that not everything works yet, see the open Lightning-SeaMonkey integration bugs for an overview.

The most notable problems are the invitation feature not working and no access to Lightning preferences.

We are working on solution for both of those and more, some work needs to be done in SeaMonkey code, some in Lightning code, but patches are coming up and we hope to have at least our side, hopefully also their side, fixed when we ship release candidates for SeaMonkey 2.0 and even more the release itself.

Note that all the general points I raised in the original blog post on this topic are still true, neither official Lightning releases with SeaMonkey support nor shipping SeaMonkey with this calendering functionality by default are planned right now, it's all about making it possible at all to install Lightning at all and making it work well enough that people can test that combination more thoroughly.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 37/2009 (September 7 - 13, 2009):

• Releases:
  Continued uploading contributed 1.1.18 builds.
  The big work item for this week was SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 though. As I need to play release driver, build engineer, marketing guy and some part of the QA lead, it took some time to get everything finished off, but I could push the beta public on Saturday. So far, everything looks fine and feedback from that release is already leading to patches being landed for 2.0 final.
• Build Machines:
  I had more discussions with Mozilla IT on how to solve the unsatisfactory situation we are in due to Parallels not delivering the stable virtualization of Mac machines we'd need, and they might get us a few minis set up. Going virtual would have been nice but unfortunately there is no good solution for this yet apparently.
  I also fought an instability of tests on Tiger, I guess it's time to make our testing on Mqac Leopard-only.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Beta 2 could go public with 17 official languages (including US English). I hope this number will even rise with RCs and final.
• German L10n:
  Unfortunately, there's a nasty typo in German SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 that breaks sending email to SMTP servers that need authentication. People only found that when testing the beta itself, but I found the cause and current nightlies as well as RCs next month are fixed, the German newsgroup has a fix circulating for those who dare to edit files inside a zipped de.jar file of their installation.
  I also updated the localization for a few changes made since we re-opened the tree for post-beta fixes.
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, EnigMail support, 2.0 approvals, quit dialogs, intermittent 1.1.18 NSS problems on Linux, QA community, Mozilla Camp Europe, Mozilla Weekly Project Meetings, etc.

I know this update is somewhat late again, I barely come to do the routine daily work right now. How does the saying go - so much to do, so little time? something like that.

In any case, we could release SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 on Saturday, and I hope it's getting out to our testers, unfortunately the Mozilla release guys who could moderate the post to the prerelease announcement list are all on vacation and the download counter has not been turned on again after being turned off for performance reasons during some recent Firefox release, we don't have any other statistics that could show us anything about the uptake of this beta, so feedback in the newsgroups etc. is the only way we know if people use and test this version. I already saw that some media has picked it up, so at least one channel seems to be working!

It's nice to see the new Mac theme in a screenshot in one of the press reports, and tabmail makes it possible to use to use current Lightning nightlies with the Beta 2 release and newer nightlies, even though there are still some glitches. We're working on fixing those problems as well so that SeaMonkey 2.0 should hopefully support Lightning 1.0 fully. Oh, and we're also working on getting our APIs beefed up enough that EnigMail should work again, by the way.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 36/2009 (August 31 - September 6, 2009):

• Releases:
  Released 1.1.18, including putting relnotes and announcements online and uploading contributed builds.
  Also, SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 went into a freeze, I did start the release process, including tagging and creating builds and updates for all 17 languages including US English. The process went smoother than for 2.0b1 but still had a few hiccups, both due to my faults and the build machines not being as stable and speedy as we could hope.
• Build System:
  Created and landed a patch to ship an add-on blocklist in our builds, and as AMO people also updated the list there and I used that, we are now saving our users from crashes etc. from bad plugins right from the start.
• Identity/EV UI:
  My patch for an identity icon in the Page Info "Security" tab could land this week right before 2.0b2 was frozen up, so people get a better visual clue on the security of the viewed page.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  We had 16 locales opting in with valid changesets, unfortunately cs didn't make it this time, but nl joined and the ones that were unofficial for Beta 1 are also official in Beta 2 so we are up 2 languages for 17 official languages supported including US English in Beta 2. I hope the numbers will rise even more for the RC(s) and final.
• Various Discussions:
  Mac build boxes, tree rules towards 2.0, Lightning support, quit dialogs, 1.1.18 NSS problems on ancient Windows and intermittently on Linux, SeaMonkey and Snow Leopard, www.mozilla.org planning, Mozilla Camp Europe, Mozilla Weekly Project Meetings, etc.

Tabbed mail landed in time for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2, so we have all the features in that we wanted to have in the 2.0 series! Thanks to everyone who has worked on getting us here, I hope we now can take this remaining month to polish up this version enough that it's ready for shipping as an official 2.0 release.

Also, thanks to jenzed from Mozilla Messaging for putting up SMILE documentation on MDC so SeaMonkey add-on developers can find resources about those APIs!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 35/2009 (August 24 - 30, 2009):

• Releases:
  I've spun a second round of Windows candidates for 1.1.18, things look good now for releasing this version very soon.
  In Parallel, we've frozen strings for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and are taking L10n opt-in from localizers as we speak, freezing the code as well this night and hoping to kick off build very soon.
• Build System:
  I closed up filtering out the entries I had so far in my new buildsystem porting tool, and wrote up a blog entry about it.
• Identity/EV UI:
  Sitting in the train and looking for something to do, I took an hour (or possibly less) to write up a patch for an identity icon in the Page Info "Security" tab, which is where you get to when clicking on any of the security indicators in the status or url bar of the browser. With that icon, users can get an impression of the security level of a site without reading all the info on the tab in detail: green icon is an EV (extended verification) level that verifies the identity of the other side, blue icon is a normal secure level that verifies the domain of the other side, gray icon is no security.
  The patch landed after the week I'm reporting on but in time for 2.0b2.
• Automated tests:
  I filed and tried to help fix mochitest timeouts on the SeaMonkey2.0 tree, but it looks like the patch Honza Bambas came up with breaks Firefox3.5 tests, while it interestingly work well for Firefox trunk. We need to further investigate this.
• Session Store:
  I landed patches for Undo close window, another feature that came just in time before the feature freeze for the SeaMonkey 2.0 series. Thanks to Misak Khachatryan for doing the work and porting that functionality to SeaMonkey!
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I started the opt-in thread for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and hope many localizations will join the train this time!
• German L10n:
  I landed two patches with help updates, thanks to Michael Opitz for doing this work. Also, I integrated more work for fixing spelling mistakes in ChatZilla, here the thanks go to Hagen Halbach for finding them and offering a patch.
  Next to that, I updated the localization for a number of SeaMonkey changes coming in before the string freeze for the upcoming second beta.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, Mac build boxes, QA team, www.mozilla.org new design going live, Mozilla Camp Europe, etc.

Tabbed mail has landed last night, and so today's nightlies are the first one to contain this feature officially, making them feature-complete for the 2.0 series! Also, the last blocker for Beta 2 just landed, more than 12 hours before the code freeze, so we should be in perfect timing for this beta - and with that, hopefully for the final as well. I'm really looking forward to both of those releases!