The roads I take...

When I looked at the download statistics page I realized that we just have gone over 3 million tracked SeaMonkey downloads this week!

Here's a per-release graph:



As with my last blog post on that topic, those numbers are once again only from the main three links we have, which run through download.mozilla.org (US English Win/Linux installers and Mac disk image) - other builds, including localizations are excluded, so the real number would probably be even higher (given that FF reports 50% of downloads being localized builds)...

I've just done the announcement dance for SeaMonkey 1.1.8 (yes, even to the SeaMonkey Blog), completing the release process for our current security update (yes, I know, we don't have partial, binary-diffed updates, those will only come for 2.x). It's always nice to ship fixes for a number of security updates and know that users of current SeaMonkey versions are safe from known vulnerabilities.

The thrill of launching that release was increased by the thrill of watching a successful Space Shuttle launch on the same day, which was even more thrilling because of the low probability of favorable weather that forecasts had given for today. Nice to see Atlantis finally up on orbit, making the Space Station really international with the European "Columbus" laboratory module.

And as that all wouldn't have been enough, I finally took up the challenge to go a bit more into code than usual, and at the same time do away with the striking emptiness of the main "Privacy & Security" pref panel in SeaMonkey. We were missing the "sanitize" feature (a.k.a. "Clear Private Data") in our suite, which seemed to fit perfectly into that empty space in my opinion - so I took a deep look into Firefox code and ported that feature to SeaMonkey. The patch ended up pretty large, but consisting mostly of code copied from Firefox, even from code that hasn't yet landed and probably won't even land for FF3! After a few hours of concentrated work, it looked all good to me - but knowing Neil, I'm pretty sure it will go through a number of iterations to fix his review comments.
In any case, this is is very likely another feature we will be able to add for SeaMonkey 2.

Having not done (much) of real Mozilla code, JS modules or XPCOM components before, I can tell anyone who doesn't dare to try that it's not that hard - especially when you can learn how things work by doing such code porting. Just Try It™!