The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 21/2010 (May 24 - 30, 2010):

• Releases:
  Still waiting on new Firefox updates to be so we can do a sync release of SeaMonkey 2.0.5 as well.
• Build Infrastructure:
  Watched the trees for intermittent failures and starred a number of them. We still have 2-3 Windows slave losses per day, but it's much better than before the slave updates for log buffering.
• View Source:
  My patches for both using toolkit's view source consistently the toolkit fixes have been reviewed and landed, we now have consistent and all suite-style view source windows.
• Add-ons:
  I've done a real lot of add-ons-related work this week, starting with bumping the maximum SeaMonkey version to 2.1a1 for Sync and Account Manager.
  While we are on sync, Google Summer of Code has taken off and Harini has posted a first result of her work in the bug to make tab sync work for SeaMonkey. Going through the reviews should make her more acquainted with the code style customs around here and set up the stage for the work on a mailnews metadata engine later this summer.
  The rest of my work in that area this week had been triggered by some recent discussions including creative thoughts on the future but also other topics causing some frustration that I had decided to escape by putting in some work and generating some sense of success. I came to the conclusion of converting some long-going thoughts of mine into concrete action and create a new Data Manager targeted for inclusion into SeaMonkey 2.1, if all goes well.
  While I was to create this as a new add-on first, to enable rapid development, get better testing and make it even available for Firefox, I realized that making my long-standing Mandelbrot XULRunner application available as an add-on would make it easier for people to download and test it, which is still quite clumsy for XULRunner applications.
  That in the end, resulted in adding two new add-ons to addons.mozilla.org, namely KaiRo.at Mandelbrot and Data Manager.
• Places:
  After I updated the Firefox fixup patch, Mano had time to review it and I could check it in. That also meant that the last question on the places history speedup patch was answered, a review could be completed and I checked that in as well.
  With that, the major prerequisite for places bookmarks is right there in the trunk tree! Following that, I created a new set of patches and yet another round of try builds that also should fix all the bugs reported to me so far with the previous ones. I hope we'll be able to get actual reviews of those patches soon.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Related to L10n at least is the topic of making "site" vs. "web site" vs. "website" usage consistent, and the "official" word on that seems now to be that "website" is the official choice for anything in that realm that can be said to be "on the web". Because of that, I created a patch to convert almost all of SeaMonkey to use "website" where "web site" or "site" had been used to talk about websites.
• German L10n:
  While thinking about how we could get more knowledge of what Mozilla work is happening in German-speaking countries ("DACH" area and more) and who are the people in that area, I realized that a German-language Mozilla planet would be a good idea and filed a bug for it.
• Various Discussions:
  My role in Mozilla, WebM and open video, Ratty's commit access (congrats!), "I believe" idea, buildbot 0.8, Mozilla network problems, commit access policy, tinderbox stats, missing MDC docs, etc.

The big things for me this week was surely the Data Manager, which I could bring up to show and manage almost all of the data I want to cover in its first incarnation. Version 0.3, which is up on AMO now, can display cookies, permissions, content prefs, passwords, and form data and also delete/manage selected entries of everything but the rarely used content prefs.
What's missing next to content pref deletion is sorting in some of the lists, some context menus on the lists, the "forget all data from this domain" function as well as dynamic updates of shown lists and tabs when the data changes from any indirect manipulation. Those are what I want to get done before calling this work a 1.0 version.
I'm also thinking about possibly replacing the tabs with sub-items in the domain tree - unless I find an even better idea. The tabs are good in principle but tabs within a tab feel somewhat strange. I'm open for good ideas there and in any other way on that Data Manager.
Still, I don't want to extend its functionality too much before going 1.0, as I'd like it to be integrated in SeaMonkey 2.1 and probably replace at least the Cookie, Image, Popup, and Password Manager windows there - consolidating all their functionality and making it easier to manage, I hope. After all, SeaMonkey should make it easy for the professional user to stay in control of his or her data.

As I've mentioned here before, I have done some work on recreating the VB app from my high school thesis as a XULRunner application - esp. as I could need the coding practice and Mandelbrot set calculation can nicely show off TraceMonkey's speed.

XULRunner apps are cumbersome when it comes to packaging and delivering them to someone else, though, so I decided to "add-on-ize" this application, and I just finished that and submitted it to AMO. It's even nominated for public, but we'll see how that goes.

So, if you want to try it yourself, you can now get KaiRo.at Mandelbrot for Firefox and SeaMonkey!

In theory, it should even work on mobile Firefox, but I have only tested the XULRunner version on my N810, not the add-on version, and it's not really fit well for the UI. So, it's just experimental, but still nice to show off XUL+JS+canvas+TraceMonkey on a mobile device!


In related news, Data Manager is also available in a first version as an add-on on AMO. This version can now show all the data I want it to display for now, but has rough edges and doesn't let you edit or manage anything yet. Because of this raw state, this will not be "public" for now and versions will stay in beta. Still, I wanted to make it available for testing, so it's there.

Feel free to help testing and get Data Manager for Firefox and SeaMonkey!

NB: I wonder if I should rebrand this to "SeaMonkey Data Manager", just for the fun of Firefox people being able to have the same experience as we have with the Firefox Sync confusion.


With all that, my add-on developer panel on AMO now lists 10 add-ons.

Today, I could land the history performance patch, and now the places bookmarks patches are ready for review!
I fixed all bugs that have been reported to me from the previous rounds of try builds - at least I hope so - and incorporated more work to be synced up with the Firefox side of places. New patches are up on the bug, I hope Neil finds the time for the actual reviews.

And here are the round 4 try builds from those new patches:

• Linux tar.bz2
• Mac OS X .dmg
• Windows .zip
• Windows installer .exe

As with the previous rounds, please test esp. bookmarks handling in those builds, ideally with copies of real-world profiles (they might destroy anything as they are highly experimental, don't use them with any profile that has no backups) and report any issues you're seeing.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 20/2010 (May 17 - 23, 2010):

• Releases:
  For SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 1, I did all I could to get what we could deliver in terms on release notes, wrote up an announcement, and finally got everything pushed live in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.
  SeaMonkey 2.0.5 release notes should be finished, so everything's ready for a release in sync with the new Firefoxes on June 1.
• Build Infrastructure:
  As the large buildbot upgrade to 0.8 still needs to wait for a few issues to be fixed (Mozilla release engineering folks are testing it), I tried to improve the situation of master load problems by updating buildbot slaves to support log buffering, which should have helped somewhat at least.
• Build:
  My patch for startup crashes on updates has now also landed on branch, which should help esp. for downgrading actions in the future.
• Places:
  The places history speedup review moved forward and I attached new patches addressing comments. I hope this will be able to land soon. I also filed a bug and patch on fixing some of those issues on the Firefox side as well.
  I tried to find out when the places transaction changes on the Firefox side might land, as I'd like those and the history patch above to be done for my next places bookmarks patch set and try builds, but unfortunately, Mano isn't reachable right now.
• View Source:
  I've been bothering me for some time that SeaMonkey is using both toolkit's view source in some places, and it's own in others, when both are almost the same. When a blog post on its importance reminded me, I decided to look into using toolkit's view source consistently and overlaying our own features on it. I came up with a patch, though some toolkit fixes were needed to make this smoother. My patch is adding roughly 260 code lines but removing about 1650, so it's a clear net win in terms of code size, functionality is nearly unchanged, and all view source windows are consistent after the patch.
• Various Discussions:
  New add-ons manager, no Summit and my role in Mozilla, WebM and open video, OpenSearch, Ratty's commit access, facebook's plans to take over the Internet, gren/orange/tree-open stats, Sync brand confusion, Win64, etc.

As I found my role and the role of SeaMonkey questioned in the light of where the web and Mozilla are going, with large, often monolithic structures and companies casting their shadows and the suite, myself or possibly even the open web itself having a stain of being old-school, backwards, and conservative, I felt I needed to do something about it.
First, I decided to not keep so many things to myself but to blog more. And second, and even more, I once again became inspired by that agenda behind Mozilla, and decided to write up an open call to make a difference, pointing out why I think that Mozilla has unique potential and why we should beat the drum for our idea of the Internet.

I hope many people join and make a difference where they live, so in the end the open web and people's freedom win.

This Internet shall have a new birth of freedom - and that network of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

therube on IRC pointed me to this picture today:



The top is "Microsoft Download Manager" (in Vista or Win7 design from what I can tell), the bottom is SeaMonkey's Download Manager (seems to be Windows Classic design, so prettiness can't be compared obviously).

I wonder if that "Microsoft Download Manager" thing is new or has been there for longer, but it looks like they pretty much did copy what has been there for a long time in the suite.

We have meanwhile taken the next steps, added a search filter, and done away with the confusing "the top toolbar only works on the selection in the tree" functionality, instead placing the most important actions as graphical mini-buttons into the tree itself. Let's see when they follow.

So, I've spent a lot of this day with philosophical issues, thinking about a lot of things surrounding, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Firefox, the web, and the future.
I found myself in danger of being misaligned with where Mozilla is heading as the project is trying to make the open web more relevant and be a force that constructs where the web as a whole is going, possibly even fearing oblivion if not being in the lead there, and SeaMonkey and myself are easily seen as conservative and backwards and probably irrelevant from that point of view. Not that I agree that things are necessarily that grim, but it is a great base to really go deep and let your thoughts wander.

Now, what are the powers that seem to be shaping a lot of the web today and which we are facing when wanting to make our mission and vision win ultimately?

Google is trying hard to be your one true way to get to information, Facebook your one true way to friends, Microsoft your one true way for applications (in the cloud), Apple your one true way to mobile computing and media - of course, all on "the web", trying to make those rather large areas of the Internet their realm and ultimately rule over your online life.
(Of course, that description of the contenders is largely incomplete, there are some more areas, some of those and probably a few others competing over them, but more details wouldn't change the picture much.)

The common theme here, as you're seeing, is that single large companies are trying to be the "one true way" to do things - some for very specific areas, some for multiple ones, possibly ultimately all your online experience.

Bring in feature-rich web applications: Now you can do everything online on their services, in the cloud, running on their machines, under their tight control, they can have all your data to use for any mining they want to make money with, share it with whomever pays, and it even looks nice and convenient for you! Isn't that cool?

One shape fits all, one entity controls all, runs all, and markets all. Well, nice if you're that entity, probably not so nice if you are individualistic, don't do or want to fit that common shape, or want to have self-control over your own (online) life, let alone don't want to or can't be online all the time. Or, heaven forbid, be creative and shape some part of the future on your own!

Now, here's where Mozilla comes in, why that project really matters, and why the future needs our work.
If you always wondered if there's some scheme going on behind what Mozilla does, be it Firefox or anything else, let me be clear: there is.
And that scheme "behind the scenes", the very core of what makes Mozilla such a great and special project, is our mission of promoting openness, innovation, and opportunity online.

That mission means, for example, that what we're trying to accomplish is that everything is built in a way that everyone can see how it works and rebuild it him-/herself and plug him-/herself into the network of services. You can built your own search engine, friend network, web application, or even mobile app/service and can fully hook it into your online experience and your browser and even offer it to others, without needing to ask anyone for permission. In that light, web applications are things you can re-shape, run independently and control yourself. You also can control your data and determine who is being able to do what with it. You can be inventive and find new ways of doing things - for you and others. And you can even choose what your window to that experience is, you're not bound to a single shape or size - e.g. use a visual screen, a screen reader or braille display; use a traditional desktop browser like Firefox, an integrated Internet suite like SeaMonkey, or a mobile browser like Firefox for mobile devices (and I'm just using our own projects as examples for convenience, we welcome any competition that is in line the mission). Or even find a completely new way of doing it!

OK, if you're in the Mozilla community, you probably already know that. But there's more.

Think about breaking down the borders between web application and desktop application development: What if writing one or the other would be so similar that it's almost or completely the same? There will always we a need for offline or local applications, and there's some historical evidence that even could make one assume that after the web application being the cool hype, there will be some wave towards local applications again. What if a developer wouldn't need to care much and his code would run the same in both settings, and at the same time on all kinds of operating systems that people may use now and in the future? I know one single piece of technology out there that is in a unique position to strongly enable and support that. Did you know that a real lot of the Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey applications are written in almost exactly the same technologies that are used for web applications? Now, guess what I'm thinking about here.

And now, what if that one shape of the window to the Internet (the browser) isn't really what fits you? What if you want a different interface that provides you with more, less, or different features? Imagine this browser, let's call it "Firefox" for the sake of the argument allows all kinds of free changes to the face it shows you, i.e. its User Interface, and anyone with knowledge of web-like technologies can create those mods and offer them to anyone else who might like them, in some kind of "add-on" system? Ah, right, we already have that. And what if you want some really different UI, say one with a lot of advanced data controlling features available fast in its menus, and that even has a built-in message center for online communication and also some easy way to create simple web content built in? Good we already have SeaMonkey for you. And what if you want to build something different yourself? We even have that already. And we are working on improving that.

Build your own shape that fits you, control your things yourself, run things like you want, make your own market. Take what's there and improve it. Create a better future.

Now, if that doesn't have potential!

We only need to work and care that it's successful.

Let's beat the drum for that. Let's keep the Internet diverse. Let's make a difference!

The recent news that Weave Sync is being rebranded suddenly made me being a GSoC mentor for Firefox Sync. Now, I'm not at all unhappy with doing work for something branded Firefox.
I actually have been contributing a few small patches to code that is specific to the desktop browser of that name, and have been spreading the word on local conferences as much about Firefox as about SeaMonkey and Mozilla in general. After all, the (desktop) browser of that name is serving all of us a huge job in spreading the Mozilla mission, making the web better and being a simple and cool solution for a majority of people, while e.g. SeaMonkey is serving a niche (and at that, one that Firefox isn't covering so easily).

Still, I'm more and more getting marketing-wise confused about the brand "Firefox". For a few years, it was very clear what it meant, now for some time the product- and usage-wise very different desktop and mobile browsers share that name, but there the argument still was that both have the same web-facing functionality and both are trying to be the best mass-market browser for the computers (devices) they run on. Now, the story has become even more complicated in my eyes.

The project I'm mentoring in Google's Summer of Code aims to make Sync's tab synchronization fully work with SeaMonkey and add the ability to synchronize mailnews metadata, e.g. which newsgroup messages or feed entries have been read or which tags are applied to which messages. If you want to know more, I'd advise you to read Harini's blog, where she's talking about her progress on that work in this summer.

Now, the fun is in the marketing message when I'm talking about this: Synchronizing mailnews metadata with Firefox Sync in SeaMonkey. Oh, wait, or is it SeaMonkey Sync now? Or is the product now to be called Firefox once Sync is installed?

I'm really confused marketing-wise.
I hope this is only me, as I want us to have strong messages for our users and not dilute our brands (like the Firefox one!) with such confusion.

Still, on the work front, things are continuing as planned, and we'll try to make Sync a first-class solution that allows people to switch between multiple computers, SeaMonkey, Firefox, and Thunderbird, desktop and mobile, and have all applicable data synchronized and with them wherever they go.

And, I guess, once Sync gets integrated into the platform (which seems to be the plan), it will not need its own identity and brand and the confusion just will go away by itself.

(As always, note that my statements - as passionate as they sometimes may sound - are never meant to be offensive and just are expressing personal opinions, giving food for thought, and/or testing arguments that could just as well come up from other parts of the community. Don't take them as stumbling blocks, just as stepping stones.)

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 19/2010 (May 10 - 16, 2010):

• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0.5 moved forward, I readied just about everything except finalization of the release notes this week. Due to more delays with shipping Firefox 3.6.4, that has most of the same security fixes (in addition to the new feature that delays things) and us not wanting to ship either unexplained security fixes or explaining vulnerabilities the Firefox hasn't shipped an update to, we are now in a waiting position and will release as soon as they are, current plan seems to be June 1.
  For SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 1, we are not dependent on any other release as it's not a security update but a feature preview. Builds have been done and tested somewhat, no major issues have been reported, so we are on track for going public, which will probably happen tomorrow. Everything should be ready except release notes and the announcement, which both still need to be finished or written up.
• Build (and Win7 integration discussion):
  I did a few build system reviews, and followed the discussion in a bug about startup crashes on updates that more and more came to the conclusion that some component registry caching files we are dynamically creating should be removed on every update, which I finally made a patch for and could land already.
  Additionally, I filed a bug on a Windows installer build failure that happened after some mozilla-central changes to better support the Win7 taskbar, and jimm as the author of the platform and Firefox patches jumped in immediately and provided fixes as well as filed a tracking bug for Win7 taskbar integration on our side. He's been very helpful, and we appreciate that a lot. He even implemented platform support for per-window-type IDs, which we can use to optimize how mail vs. browser windows are treated by Win7. Help from you in the community to actually fill the gaps in our own code to make it all work would be appreciated, he surely would be willing to help there!
• Context Menu:
  You might remember that I had been doing work on a context menu test earlier. In that work, I realized we have bookmarking entries in there which need to be adapted for my places work, and that in turn made me realize it would be good to have a reference to the browser element the menu is being opened on. When I tried to implement that, I saw how alien indentation and code style in the file were, so the patch turned into a major cleanup of this JS file. I updated it this week for some review comments and could land it in the end, hopefully making this code better to work with. I also filed some followups to further improve this code.
• Places:
  I successfully ported the de-XBLification of bookmarks menu and toolbar to my local work on places bookmarks this week, but I still need to split it up and merge the work into the correct patch set parts. I might wait for review on places history speedup on our side or readiness/landing of places transaction changes on the Firefox side before I'll attach new patches and generate new try builds, though.
• Various Discussions:
  The name of MailNews, Account Manager, Summit, tree/network issues, new add-ons manager, release delays and OOPP blockers, Weave Sync L10n, Ratty's commit access, buildbot version upgrade, Thunderbird mailing lists without newsgroup mirrors, stage/FTP cleaning policy, etc.

Some time ago, the Czech Mozilla team asked me to answer a few questions about SeaMonkey - now this interview with me has been published (also available in Czech) - apparently they picked my statement how a marketing team could improve SeaMonkey usage as a headline.

Also, even while the first alpha is only about the be released, a few interesting things are in the pipe for or already landed in 2.1-targeted nightlies, like the new addons manager (see teaser screenshot (that still has a few things to be ironed out), our version of the findbar, customization of the mail search toolbar and more. And with your help, this already incomplete list can even grow more!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 18/2010 (May 3 - 9, 2010):

• Releases:
  I got 2.0.5 builds going (candidates are up for testing) and pushed them to the beta channel after some testing. Actual release might get delayed due to 3.6.4, with the same security fixes but even a large feature, is being delayed as well.
  For that release, I also went through L10n signoffs and after some review could add en-GB and zh-CN (Simplified Chinese) to our shipped locales - thanks to those L10n teams to provide this cool work!
  Also, I tried to get things lined up for cutting 2.1 Alpha 1, which took a while because of some blocker bugs needing to get out of the way (build breakage prohibiting Windows test runs, MDN breakage, Modern toolbar menubutton breakage). Meanwhile, into this week, it looks like we finally have what we need for this first Alpha.
  To support those releases and get them on track, I created preliminary release notes and filed a number of bugs tracking various stuff that needs to happen for the releases.
• Build:
  We had a very interesting build problem I looked into this week, which happened when the debug builds on Windows wanted to install tests for the content module. The error message of "nsinstall.exe: bad file number" was quite unhelpful, but when I investigated by taking one of our build slaves off the build bool and attacking it manually, I found out we actually seemed to be hitting a length limitation in the command line of the Windows build environment. We had been hitting this on those builds first (and not on other SeaMonkey or even on Firefox builds) as paths in that configuration are slightly longer than elsewhere. Installing 321 test files in one command line could make it grow even over 33,000 characters, and somewhere in that range we did hit a wall (smells so much like 32,767 but we seemed to get somewhat over that - maybe it's just argument string length or such).
  In the end, I made a patch for splitting that list of tests into two parts, the patch was accepted into mozilla-central and the problem is gone now.
• Places:
  The places bookmarks patch set has been on the backburner this week, but I followed as de-XBL of toolbars and menus landed for Firefox, will adopt this as soon as I come around to.
• Various Discussions:
  Account Manager, Summit, module owners, tree/network issues, etc.

I sent a lot of this week not only recovering from a cold but also at a local FOSS conference called "Linuxwochen" in Vienna. Lots of conversations there were pretty interesting, including those on getting an open geolocation database service going and thinking about organizing open source meetings together with the OpenOffic.org guys - oh, and probably even the one with the Microsoft guy who presented their "surface" desk and who didn't see why I disliked that it wasn't using an open software stack. The FSFE team congratulated me to that discussion the day after...
My talk on "Mozilla is more than Firefox" was quite well-received, people seemed to be particularly interested in mobile, Weave and Labs, and video, and someone also told me that "Mozilla should advertise the philosophy more". Also, the Mozilla swag I did get some time ago is now almost fully in the hands of the people.

Another fruitful conference experience with a lot of interesting chat with cool people - now let's put an interesting first 2.1 alpha into the hands of another set of cool people!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 17/2010 (April 26 - May 2, 2010):

• Context Menu:
  I did some more work on the context menu test and related accesskeys to fix Windows failures and cover some additional cases, and filed followups for selection tests and potentially hiding items.
  I had been stumbling over the "Bookmark This Page" and similar items of the context menu in earlier work, and now tried to fix that up to work correctly with places bookmarks, when I noticed I needed a reference to the browser element there. This led me to vastely re-styling nsContextMenu.js code to match current coding and whitespace styles.
• Bugzilla Cleanup:
  After a few weeks of discussion, I finally performed the proposed bug expiration - with the exception of help bugs - and switched almost exactly 2000 bugs in that move, leading to a massive decrease in bugs that need manual triage.
• Project Organization:
  Anticipating our Alpha 1 code freeze on May the 4th (today!), I poked responsible people on getting new-style flags for SeaMonkey 2.1 - thanks to Reed and Dave for their massive help there!
  Once we had the flags, I used them to triage blocking and wanted requests and ported all old 2.1a1 flag usages over to the new ones.
  In this last week before the mentioned freeze, we had a number of compile bustages from mozilla-central work, accidentally. I discussed those and tried to get someone to fix them, which succeeded in the end. Thanks to Bas, Standard8, and everyone else who helped there!
• Places:
  I worked on fixing a few bugs in the places bookmarks patch set, stumbling over the above-mentioned context menu thing there, and succeeding on getting rid of some, but I need to do more work there.
  Next to that, I closely followed some exciting work going on in places (de-XBL of toolbars and menus and modularizing transactions), which will need porting to our side once they land.
• German L10n:
  I did lots of updates for German L10n, bringing core and SeaMonkey trunk to green state for a short time.
• Various Discussions:
  Account Manager, Mnenhy, "site" vs. "web site" vs. "website", SeaMonkey 2.0 interview series, comm-1.9.2 branching, drumbeat catchphrases, hackers and posters, Summit, preparations for upcoming releases, new add-ons manager, etc.

I've been trying Account Manager this week, and interestingly it installed right away for SeaMonkey and even works somewhat! Of course, it's in a completely experimental state and doesn't do much yet as well as doesn't work with many sites right now, but that should change over time. Even when it still was "Weave Identity", I already found its ideas quite compelling, and I hope we'll be able to continue to have it working as well as possible with SeaMonkey even when it grows up as a Firefox project.

In other news related to Weave and SeaMonkey, I'm mentoring a Google Summer of Code project on Weave Sync engines for tabs and mailnews status for SeaMonkey this year, and had the first planning talks with Harini Sirisena on how we'll proceed with this. You can also follow Harini's blog to see what's going on in her project. Having your tabs from Firefox (desktop or mobile) or another SeaMonkey installations available on your SeaMonkey is surely nice (and almost there already anyhow), having the read status of feed entries and newsgroup messages as well as possibly message tags being synched up between installations would be really cool though and is the actual goal here.