The roads I take...

After somewhat more time than we had expected earlier, we finally have a great SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release available for you. This release really brings the suite up to modern standards, supporting feeds as well as HTML5 audio/video, managing add-ons in a comfortable way (as known from Firefox 3.5), having customizable toolbars in both browser and mail windows, and much more - and all that in more than a dozen languages right from the beginning.

In many ways this beta is much better than our stable 1.1.x releases, and it's probably not even less stable from most points of view, but it still has some corners that need smoothing and some features we want to add before calling it a final 2.0 release.

Pushing it out to the public today was one small step for a release engineer, but one giant leap for the project. One after after celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first human setting foot on a different celestial body, i.e. the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, this is our mission of exploration, boldly moving the well-known Internet suite where it has never been before - into a state where it fully fit for the challenges the Internet and web sets for us today and laying the base of where it can be tomorrow.

To echo what Buzz Aldrin said two days ago when asked if we can manage the challenges to go the way even further and step further out - in the case of space exploration, that's bringing humans to the Mars and beyond, in the case of SeaMonkey it's a 2.0 release and beyond - I fully agree with him paraphrasing a nowadays almost overused sentence:

Yes, we can.

(And you can join us in that task by testing this beta, reporting bugs, and if you're really bold, exploring possible improvements and writing patches. Yes, you can.)

Thunderbird came around with setting up a schedule just in time, so at yesterday's SeaMonkey Status Meeting, we agreed on adopting Thunderbird 3.0b3 dates as the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 schedule as well (times of 23:59 US/Pacific, as usual):

• Slushy String freeze date: 2009-07-02 (Thur)
• Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-07-07 (Tues)
• Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-07-14 (Tues)
• l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-07-16 (Thur)?*
• Target Ship date: 2009-07-21 (Tues)

This is the first time we have string freezes for SeaMonkey, so let me give you some explanation:

After the slushy string freeze, string changes should be avoided where possible, and those needed must get approval-seamonkey2.0b1+ before being checked in.

After the slushy code freeze, the same is true for any code changes, though blocking-seamonkey2.b1+ bugs without string changes can go in without further approval (blocking+ serves as approval).

The firm freeze should be the cutoff for any changes at all, unless there are blockers we still need to fix.

* I'm not completely sure about the freeze for L10n, we might not need that at all, as we'll likely do the same opt-in process as Firefox did recently and so might be able to just take any L10n changes up to the time when we start the builds. This is the first time we're doing that, so please excuse roughness in the process.