Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Developer DevNews: Thunderbird 3.0 (Release Candidate 2) now available for download

Posted 4 days ago by standard8

Please note: the Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate 2 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, stability, and speed. We recommend that you ... [More] read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Thunderbird 3.0 (Release Candidate 2) is now available for download, containing fixes based on the feedback obtained from the previous release candidate.

New features in Thunderbird 3 that require feedback include:

New Search Tools
Tabbed Email
Message Archiving
New Mail Account Setup Wizard
Improvements for Developers

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate 2 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 49 different languages. Developers should also read the Thunderbird 3.0 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

As always, the Mozilla community would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have about this release, or any bugs you may find.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development. [Less]

Sarah Doherty: Mentioned in the RIT Alumni Magazine – So Cool!

Posted 4 days ago by sarah

J. Paul Reed: It's MFBT (for multiple values of "B")

Posted 4 days ago

When I joined Mozilla Corporation, you either ran your own blog1, had a Mozillazine blog, or didn't involve yourself in such frivolities at all.3

An X-Ray of Major Software Releases
I remember asking the then-VP of Engineering who I ... [More] should talk to about "getting my blog Mozilla set up." Since the company was about twenty people back then, the answer wasn't obvious, so he pointed me to #mozillazine. I went and asked around and I got my Mozilla blog.

And all was good with the world. For a time.

But times change, and at some point in the last four years, it became cool4 to run your own blog.

So now, years later, since all the cool kids are doing it, I finally set up my own blog.

If the name—The Sober Build Engineer—doesn't immediately make sense, maybe the introduction will help.

In an attempt to not spam Planet Mozilla, I won't be syndicating everything; but if you find my ramblings amusing5, the raw RSS feed is always available.

I'd like to thank MattyT, Mozillazine, and OSUOSL for hosting "my Mozilla blog" for the last few years.

And I hope to see y'all on the flip side6.

Oh... and of course, the first round is on me...

__________
1 Not as likely, since it wasn't as "cool" back then2
2 Yes, I'm that old....
3 Until the "blogosphere" became a "big deal"
4 Dare I say chic?
5 Or otherwise...
6 Bug 532342 tracks movin' me over [Less]

Gen Kanai: Filipinos Fête Five Years of Firefox

Posted 4 days ago by Gen Kanai

On November 26th, the newest Mozilla community, Mozilla Philippines, which started only a few weeks earlier in the Philippines, celebrated the Five Years of Firefox at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila.

Everything came together ... [More] very quickly with organization driven by Regnard Raquedan, our new community leader, as well as the Filipino Campus Reps, (Ren-Ren Gabas, Allan Caeg, and Joell Lapitan among many others) who have been very active.  Sherwin Sowy of Globe Labs (a division of Globe Telecom) was kind enough to help with sponsorship and showed off a Firefox Addon that university students had recently developed which enabled the sending of web content (text or images) via SMS/MMS.

If you would like to join the new community that is growing in the Philippines to support Mozilla and Firefox, please join the Philippine Mozilla community list.

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

Other blog posts on the event can be found here:

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done! – Mozilla Philippines

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

Five Years of Firefox in Manila! – a set on Flickr (Photos courtesy of Aja Lapus & Joell Lapitan)

Mozilla Firefox Turns Five

5 Years of Firefox in Manila, a Report

Happy 5th Birthday Mozilla Firefox!

2009-11-21 Five Years of Firefox in Manila – a set on Flickr: [Less]

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: SeaMonkey Meeting Minutes: 2009-12-01

Posted 4 days ago by bsmedberg

SeaMonkey:StatusMeetings:2009-12-01
From MozillaWiki

« last meeting | index

SeaMonkey Meeting Details

Time: December 01, 2009, 13:00 UTC

Location: #seamonkey IRC channel

Who’s taking minutes? ... [More] -> Ratty

(who needs to do what that hasn’t been recorded in a bug) We should assign people to the open items.

NEW

KaiRo to add to the known issues page additional items from the SeaMonkey 2.0 Final/Feedback section from the previous meeting. Somebody needs to go through the items and sort out what needs to be added.

Ratty to draft out some messages to encourage extension authors to make their extensions compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0. Once the Council approves them, we can forward to AMO for dissemination. The messages should target two groups:

Existing SeaMonkey extensions that haven’t been upgraded to 2.0.

Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors encouraging them to make their extensions compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0.
Ratty filed AMO bug 527919 for this and attached some drafts. Once the messages are approved, they should be forwarded to AMO and they will take care of sending these out to extension developers.

OPEN

Get permission from Google to use their geolocation JSON service [KaiRo]. Contact at Google says: “We don’t have a good estimate for when GLS will be opening up more broadly, but I will be sure to let you know when we take that step. Sorry that I can not be more specific at this time.” – We can only wait right now.

KaiRo emailed Google again more than 8 weeks ago and again 5 weeks ago, no reply yet, even though the MoCo geolocation contact has poked the Google contact as well.

KaiRo will try to get this process restarted.

CLOSED

Shipped on October 27!

167 fixed-seamonkey2.0 bugs (all post 2.0b2)!

Feedback

The new Password and Form Managers seem to be hard for people to grasp. There is an existing documentation bug, bug 463903 for form autocomplete.

Need for a form history editor to edit/delete incorrect entries. We can make use of an existing bug (bug 480734) to track a native Forms editor.
For some users cut&paste isn’t working for some Windows 7 users. Specifically, nothing gets pasted (bug 525601.

This has been traced to the McAfee Site Advisor component of the McAfee Internet Security Suite. A regression range has been identified (2007110103/2007103102). This regression range corresponds to a similar cut and paste problem in Thunderbird 3.0a but not involving McAfee.

The McAfee techs would like a developer from the SeaMonkey side to assist them in tracking down the problem. Do we have someone with the required skillset? Perhaps Neil.

We seem to have accidentally migrated from 1.1 all the “browser.toolbars.showbutton.*” preferences when we shouldn’t. The most common case appears to be the home button. Our button pref listener are still active because of the Go and Search buttons in the URL bar. Ratty has filed bug 531526 for this.
See the previous meeting notes for more details: StatusMeetings:2009-11-17#SeaMonkey_2.0_Final
BenoitRen notes increasing reports about problems with mailnews, possibly due to shipping code from a beta Thunderbird 3.0.

open blockers (3)
blocker requests (7)
open wanted (0)
wanted requests (0)

Should be released in sync with Firefox 3.5.6, currently scheduled for December 15.

Even though the SeaMonkey-specific fixes are only some smaller ones, the improved mailnews maturity and the core crash and security fixes sound like they’re worth it

How ready are we for it?

Blocker nominations need to be triaged, but probably can be put off to 2.0.2.

Bug statistics for last two (full) weeks: 57 new, 17 fixed, 29 triaged.

High rate of new bugs immediately after 2.0 release but declining.

Fixing rate down as we all take a breath after this.
Triage rate down from 58 at last meeting.
We need to do more triaging. We should probably start to look at trashing 1.x-only bugs as well (and see if any still happen on 2.x).

Major wanted/needed features:

bug 423281 Help updates.

Status/Progress?

bug 483282 Make sure normal SeaMonkey use doesn’t pay a price for having venkman installed.

Needs at least a core patch landing for 1.9.1.6 (.5 will be a short-cycle crash-fixing update) bug 364864 nsICategoryManager::deleteCategoryEntry does not persist outside of component registration.

Progress/Status?

bug 471346 Port GetDefaultFeedReader to SeaMonkey shell service. New patch needed.

New patch needed.

bug 460953 kill-rdf port [sgautherie]

Status/Progress?

bug 436794 Enable Mac OS X system address book per default and add UI.

SM UI needed, unowned, helpwanted.

bug 410613 OpenSearch. helpwanted.

We need to check if OpenSearch can support all our existing functionality, for example the INTEPRETS section in Sherlock search plugins. Mnyromyr will check on that, and on how extensible the Firefox code is.

bug 449728 drag tabs between windows

unowned so far.

bug 498596 places bookmarks

unowned so far.

bug 477845 Build a standalone (Gecko 1.9.1) Composer

Will look into that once KompoZer 0.8 is done.

bug 477840 Backport KompoZer to Composer

Will look into that once KompoZer 0.8 are done.

bug 523274 Complete new default theme icon set

status/progress?

A list of TODO icons is up in the bug
Still needs quite a bit of work.
bug 522023 is working on improving the browser globe in task icons, etc..

bug 526210 Update the icon set for the SeaMonkey Modern Theme.

unowned so far.

bug 521927 Make Search, Folder Location and Views widgets for MailNews customizable toolbars.

Status/Progress?

We also should take a look at the other items on wanted-seamonkey2.1+

Status Updates from developers – what are you working on, what’s the progress, any other comments? (feel free to add yourself to the list if your name is missing and you have interesting status).

Usual testing, reviewing and commenting.

Bugs waiting approval for 1.9.1.x

bug 525373 Make customizable toolbars play nicely with children with disabled attributes (toolkit)

bug 510920 Sync to breakpad revision 350 for breakpad fix 248, 10.5+ SDK compat

Working on:

bug 439134 “Customize toolbars” window a bit too small on linux – cuts off the “Restore defaults” button – waiting for reviews.

bug 515967 Add icons to addressbook menulist in Search Addresses.
bug 519133 Newsgroup list in Message Filters Dialog has blank entry and extra separator.
bug 521927 Make Search, Folder Location and Views widgets for MailNews customizable toolbars – waiting for reviews.
bug 529647 Make Search and Go buttons widgets for Browser customizable toolbars – waiting for review but new patch needed.

Just back from vacation, not much to tell yet. working large backlog this week

As always, my blog has more detailed status about my work.

Helping out in the Mozillazine SeaMonkey Support forum ;)

Working on:

All latest sessionstore stuff (all of them ported, many of them doesn’t have bug numbres yet), waiting to council decision about bug 530735

bug 524369 Port bug 491168 [Allow SessionStore to save/restore referrer field] to SeaMonkey.
bug 530735 Consider to use same undo close tab mechanism as in Firefox.

Working on:

bug 456874 Need a policy/rule of thumb, for new prefpane usage by extensions.

bug 521803 tabbrowser.xml: “Error: this.mPanelContainer is null”, opening MailNews.
bug 521891 Need pref pane entry for extension blocklist feature.
bug 520480 Sidebar is empty and tab options unresponsive.

Bugs fixed:

bug 152526 Menu->Send link does not open external mail app (should use mailto .

bug 503794 Unable to remove an attachment.
bug 517726 Update SeaMonkey’s treeView.js to match new view API.
bug 528755 Find a place for filepicker’s filter strings to live.
bug 529151 Remove obsolete calls to suppressFocusScroll (edit)
bug 530406 Search for “Age in days” uses “is” with “is less than” default, works fine when manually selected.
bug 530805 storeReadMailInPFC no longer exists.

Working on:

bug 505525 nsWindowsShellService.cpp build failure due to gfxIImageFrame removal.

bug 525047 ‘make clean’ deletes automationutils.py.

Bugs fixed:

bug 526339 file action on a message fail to show the whole tree of folders.

bug 528506 In the SeaMonkey Default Theme Account Central pane, the icon in the “create new calendar” row is misaligned.

Working on:

bug 526148 Port bug 525712 (Remove dead throbber-specific code from customizeToolbar.js, handle it in themes).

bug 531645 “My Yahoo” should be “My Yahoo!” in the list of feed handlers (Port bug 432118).
bug 531661 Add an ID for the “Show Remote Content” button.
bug 531779 MailNews: The File Button is not initialized until restart after being dragged out of the palette window and on to a toolbar.

Other:

Filed AMO bug 527919 (Obtain a list of extension author email addresses so that the SeaMonkey Council can mass mail them) on behalf of KaiRo and monitoring it.

Bug triage and Bug discussions including:

Tracking McAfee issue with bug 525601 Copy and cut (clipboard) functions do not work in SM 2.0.

AgitProp and PR in http://forums.mozillazine.org/
Answering questions in the Mozillazine SeaMonkey Support forum.

Fixed SeaMonkey bugs:

bug 531292 Port |Bug 530723 – Disable ipc, since it requires libxul and we can’t build that way (yet)| to SeaMonkey

See also

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-11-24#sgautherie

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-12-01#sgautherie

And working on other areas… like

infrastructure to run tests

filing bugs for leaks in (TUnit) tests
doing a Windows comm-central-trunk SeaMonkey unit test build, filing bugs as needed; looking forward to an official build when enough new buildbot slaves can be enabled (bug 464325 follow-ups).

See Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-11-24#Standard8.

See Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-12-01#Standard8.

Bugs fixed:

bug 525698 [Mac Classic] Need new css for pageinfo.

bug 525926 [MacOSX] Sub-menus in native Bookmarks menu have “Empty” menuitem.
bug 528629 Redo Undo both use keyboard shortcut COMMAND+Z in Mail message composition.
bug 531139 Reference to non-existing places.js in placesOverlay.xul.

Working on:

bug 528752 [Mac Classic] History drop-down height doesn’t match full number of rows.

EOL date for SeaMonkey 1.1?

The plans for Gecko 1.8 are rather murky at the moment. KaiRo will probably try to get a clearer view when a 1.8.1.24 will be prepared possibly in December.

IanN asks can we combine stop and reload buttons?

Nobody else likes this idea.

It would be good to have some of the icons that firefox now has for browser, and some more non-default toolbar buttons like “Print Preview”. But we need suitable graphics for both themes.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:StatusMeetings:2009-12-01“ [Less]

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Thunderbird Meeting Minutes: 2009-12-01

Posted 4 days ago by bsmedberg

Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-12-01
From MozillaWiki
< Thunderbird | StatusMeetings
last meeting | index | next meeting »

Thunderbird Meeting Details :

Tuesday, December 12th, 17:30 UTC (9:30am Pacific, 12:30pm ... [More] Eastern)

How to dial-in

Who’s taking minutes? –> gozer

Minute taking Schedule. Talk to davida for schedule changes/additions.

Planning for a dry-run security firedrill build

Released last Tuesday (24th Nov).

Never got unthrottled, so uptake might have suffered as a result

Picks up a small list of bugs

Hoping to release today.
Still a few website issues need fixing up

Blockers are mainly web site updates.

Remaining blockers are either trackers, or test-only/build changes to support the security & stability releases.

TB 3 Security and Stability page updated now that we have flags for 3.0.x tracking.

Blockers

blocking-thunderbird3+: 14 (+2)

TB 3 Needs: 2 (+1)

Proposed Blocking

Proposed Blockers (all): 4 (+4)

Fixed RC1

TB 3.0rc1 – blocking: 153 (-2) (not sure what happened here)

No concrete plan as of yet

Already can mark bugs as blocking 3.0.1

Post 3.0 Roadmap

Post 3.1 Roadmap
Tb 3.1 cycle specifics
More branches and work on branches
Feedback on schedule for 3.next is wanted.

Testing Thunderbird RC1 Build3

Spot-checking Thunderbird RC2

Plan to get back to regular QA activities post 3.0 release.

3.0rc1/rc2 topcrashes – Crash or sorted by rank.

status

bug

summary

# of crash

Issue with Enigmail

bug 531339

nsRefPtr<nsDOMWorkerMessageHandler>::assign_assuming_AddRef(nsDOMWorkerMessageHandler*) | nsRefPtr<nsScreen>::assign_with_AddRef(nsScreen*) | nsMsgComposeAndSend::InitCompositionFields(nsMsgCompFields*, nsACString_internal const&, int)

781 30%

Unassigned

bug 505717

EscapeFromSpaceLine(nsIOutputStream*, char*, char const*)

79 3%

assigned

bug 513543

MimeInlineTextHTML_parse_eof

75 3%

Unassigned

bug 505016

_purecall | nsXPCWrappedJS::QueryInterface(nsID const&, void**)

69 3%

Unassigned

bug 519962

_purecall | nsPrefBranch::freeObserverList() | nsPrefBranch::Observe(nsISupports*, char const*, unsigned short const*)

67 3%

3.0b4 topcrashes – slight update, see previous meeting

Slow press week, but some pick up for RC1. Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate: Just in Time for Thanksgiving, Mozilla issues near-final Thunderbird 3, Mozilla ready to hatch Thunderbird 3

Getting things ready for RC 2.
Other: All Hands next week, Add-on Con next Friday 12/11, Firefox market share (45%) surpasses IE in Germany in recent survey, Extend Firefox 3.5 Winners

Upgraded our Jabber servers to eJabberd 2.1.0

Pushed 3.0rc1 content live to www.mozillamessaging.com
Thunderbird 3.0 RC1/RC2
Calendar 1.0 Beta 1 : In Progress

Done

message tabs article for support knowledge base

update how-to status and markers
call for doc help (blog and TB mailing list)
link / cross-linking to RC1 release notes
edit Content Tab docs
More docs is needed

Ludovic suggested a Doc Day, like Test Days

Jen suggested a first try in 2 weeks

TODO / In Progress

blog Content Tab docs after response to questions (Standard8)

edit and link up gloda docs; clean up crufty old stuff
blog content tabs when finalized
support doc locations ([ 521665])
folders ([ ])
Mission control / autoconfig: MDC
msg headers ([ 466025], [ 480623])
new bug for debugging issues? (and close [ 420317]?)

Top 5 GS Thunderbird 2 Support Topics (code in progress: http://gist.github.com/190923 ) basically the same as last week

Cannot send email

Cannot receive email
migration to Vista and Windows 7 from XP including email and address books and from Outlook and Outlook Express
attachments not working

Thunderbird 3 RC1 Top Support Issues (starting to monitor to see what we can improve for post 3.0)

change tls if available on 2.0 to START TLS in tb3, needs to be done manually in rc1, in rc2 will be done automatically

people looking for addons for lightning and google calendar sync

SUMO for MoMo tracker ticket:

Goal is to get initial content and theming done at the end of the week – GS branding is done except for last bit of testing and MoMo footer menu tweaks

SuMoMo call for writers blog post

Key Support stats from the following graphic:

approximately 29/ day (204/7, slightly higher than last week if we subtract the Raindrop topics)

total new topics:204 total replies: 372 (Ruby Code)

date:20091124 #new support topics:18 resolved:30

date:20091125 #new support topics:33 resolved:15
date:20091126 #new support topics:36 resolved:14
date:20091127 #new support topics:26 resolved:5
date:20091128 #new support topics:19 resolved:7
date:20091129 #new support topics:20 resolved:2
date:20091130 #new support topics:21 resolved:3

#replies from non MoMo folks: 5 from tanstaafl (thanks and welcome!), 108 from pasa (thanks), 1 from TMZ (thanks) MoMo folks: 1 from Wayne Mery (thanks) 79 from Roland, Bienvenu 30 (thanks!), 2 from Tom (thanks!) 6 from Kent James (thanks) 6 from Lightning team (thanks!), 4 from Andreas (thanks!), 8 from Standard8 (thanks), 1 from asuth (thanks!)
happiness metric: API doesn’t have happiness emotitags, , code in progress: http://gist.github.com/190094, manual happiness metric = 123 – 79 = 44 (30 last week), 40 Hendrix messages (generally Hendrix messages are unhappy but this week we had 1 happy messages) – [ bug to track down Hendrix for Thunderbird 3 and get rid of it as much as possible]

Reviews and Driving

Fixed bug 516950 autoconfig pop3 accounts should be configured to download new mail, put in RC2
Found an other fix for imap hang on shutdown, with use tls if available set, bug 494014, and put in RC2
Removed unused aol pfc code, bug 530618
Did a lot of trouble shooting of bugs and Get Satisfaction issues.

www.mozillamessaging.com trunk content about 3.0rc1 live

make package-compare on try server
staging buildbot gets its mozconfigs from a clone of buildbot-configs

Testing gcc-4.3.3

Upgraded jabber cluster to ejabberd-2.1.0 – bug 531287
Split up Ganglia graphing per VLAN

ui-reviews and driving

looked into bug 531317 but no ideas yet
connected with Add-on Collections developers

got collections add-on for thunderbird

investigating a thunderbird made specifically for netbooks (via add-ons)

looked into space requirements

andreas investigating minimal ui elements

yet more audit and clean up of crash & hang bugs

duping of enigmail bugs
triage
filed crash & hang bugs:

bug 530845 [@ nsWindowWatcher::OpenWindowJSInternal(nsIDOMWindow*, char const*, char const*, char const*, int, nsIArray*, int, nsIDOMWindow**)] (not startup)

bug 531294 crash sending message [@ nsRefPtr<nsCSSFontFaceRule>::assign_assuming_AddRef(nsCSSFontFaceRule*)] due to incompatible version of enigmail
bug 531339 enigmail [@ nsRefPtr<nsDOMWorkerMessageHandler>::assign_assuming_AddRef(nsDOMWorkerMessageHandler*) | nsRefPtr<nsScreen>::assign_with_AddRef(nsScreen*) | nsMsgComposeAndSend::InitCompositionFields(nsMsgCompFields*, nsACString_internal const&, int)]
bug 531716 crash [@ nsAbMDBCard::Equals(nsIAbCard*, int*)]
bug 531568 topcrash [@ nsImapMailCopyState::`vector deleting destructor(unsigned int)]
bug 531794 regression [@ nsNntpCacheStreamListener::OnDataAvailable(nsIRequest*, nsISupports*, nsIInputStream*, unsigned int, unsigned int)]
bug 531792 crash [@ nsImapMailFolder::UpdateImapMailboxInfo]

[ bugzilla whine in bmo is fixed] thanks to justdave, and very handy indeed for timely summary notification of bugs I might care about]. Sample query is 1 day resolution … longer and shorter resolution (eg 1hr) are possible.

Still wrangling with gloda in Search Message window and FUMLUB issues

Eudora/Penelope Beta still on hold

Back from vacation, working backlog from last 3 weeks

SeaMonkey 2.0.1 planned for release two weeks from now, in sync with Gecko 1.9.1.6 (not everything landed on our side that we would have liked, but this already has 93 fixes, including ones for grave security issues, over SeaMonkey 2.0 final)

Working on:

[ ] see: draft

[ ] see: draft

Supporting pr team for reviews.
RC 2 work.
Web site l10n work, looking at about 49 locales for final release.

Been working slowly on making tags mozmill tests

Last week:

Lightning icons for Linux and Windows bug 494598

Thunderbird netbook extension mockups
Reviewed bug 525971

This week:

Finish Lightning icons for Windows bug 494598

Look into Vista theme feedback and polish bug 532048
More netbook mockups and ideas
Look into online/offline experience bug 468006

Done:

Reviewed bug 522253, bug 516950, bug 530721, and bug 518315.

Posted patches for bug 530972, bug 530975, and bug 527550.
Committed bug 522249.
Set up a new VM to test ISPDB under Python 2.4.
Created an extension to implement bug 525070.
Decided to update my status weekly on Tuesday mornings.

Next:

Continue working on the extension for bug 525070.

Drive forward the ISPDB patches.
Take Thursday off to attend the iPhone Tech Talks.
Maybe add permalinks to the weekly updates so that I don’t need to type this all in twice.

Fixed MailNews Core bugs:

bug 271841 Show full newsgroup name as tooltip for abbreviated newsgroup names

working on 1.0b1rc1, lots of build related complications

gozer is doing a great job helping us get the release running.
future releases will be much easier, working on having buildbot auto-create also localized release lightning builds
can’t make the meeting today, sorry!

Will not be at meeting, but want to mention:

My biased opinions on extensibility
Still working on the extend-C++-in-JS bug, but school is eating up most of my free time right now

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-12-01“ [Less]

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Platform Meeting Minutes: 2009-12-01

Posted 4 days ago by bsmedberg

Platform/2009-12-01
From MozillaWiki
< Platform
« previous week | index | next week »

Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6

builds made, on track for mid-December release

Firefox 3.0.17 / Firefox 3.5.7

... [More] proposed schedule online

tree is open!
please work on your blockers

Firefox 3.6 Beta

500,000 active daily users (though only 50% are on the latest beta)

need to get to 650,000 to be able to map stability data onto the general population

Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate

there are 18 code blockers remaining

goal is to get to RC build this week, long poles appear to be

GFX kerning bug required by Fennec

JS new bugs reported from beta 3 rollout, need to wait for beta 4 data to come in

See more Firefox 3.6 related blocker queries, or learn about the new status and blocker flags

Release Blockers (flag: blocking1.9.2 or blocking-firefox3.6)

27 OPEN (-19 w/w)

18 FIXED but not yet fixed on mozilla-1.9.2 (+2 w/w)
15 nominations (+3 w/w)
Handy charts: Blocker snapshots, Blocker and Noms trends

Approvals

email beltzner if you have approval requests needing attention

86 requests (-14 w/w)
9 approved but not yet fixed on mozilla-1.9.2 (+2 w/w)
Charts: Nominations snapshots

(Progress reports every weekend on Planet Firefox)

see our active projects and get involved / propose others

Namoroka/mozilla-1.9.2 front end development:

0 blockers left, though there are some crashkill nominations to deal with

mozilla-1.9.3 front end development:

Unfocused has tryserver builds up with tab match in awsomebar

David Dahl has a new Places query API
Mossop is updating the extension manager API and Boriss is looking at the UI
Faaborg and the Places team are starting into the UI changes they proposed and discussed earlier
Rob Strong is analysing several potential updater fixes
Limi is looking at the resource packages issue
Paul is updating the tab opening order heuristic
Marco is moving Places expiry I/O off the main thread
Drew is making asynchronous containers for Places operations
Horlander is driving forward the theme change work

3 blockers.

The long pole continues to be Stuart’s subpixel positioning/kerning bug (latest ETA: “later this week”).

0 noms.
Jim Mathies’ out-of-process windowless plugins on Windows patch is undergoing review, as is Bas Schouten’s Direct2D Cairo backend.
Bas has had quite a number of downloads of his Direct2D build of Minefield, providing a lot of great feedback and bug reports. Unfortunately some of the bug reports are of the sort we feared, driver- or hardware-dependent. We’re hoping to get Direct2D into mozilla-central as soon as possible, preffed off, for wider-spread testing.
Bas also posted a great writeup on measuring performance of his Direct2D builds: how to do it, how not to do it, and when it’s useful.
Chris Jones’ Electrolysis shared memory support is undergoing review, for future use in Fennec+Electrolysis. Work for shared memory tilebrowser is waiting on this.
The WebGL standard goes to Khronos review this week. More public information will be forthcoming once the Khronos board approves it.
Topcrashes and blockers are consuming the rest of our time.

0 noms

2 new blockers

bug 531810 roc will debug this today

bug 531075 needs review/help from Neil Deakin

bug 527280 looks like it could be Flash video randomly corrupting browser memory … very difficult to reproduce/analyze, could use some help trying to reproduce on Windows
SMIL syncbase timing patch submitted [birtles]

1.9.2:

3 blockers, all crashers

1 nomination, needs more information
bug 520639 has a likely fix, the rest are being investigated.

bnewman demoed JPW’s talking across processes.
peterv fixed a cycle collector top crash for 3.6.
Jonas has been investigating crashkill bugs and evaluating what dll’s to block etc.
hsivonen was able to land the fix for a HTML5 parser crash fix, and continues to work on the off main thread parser.
jduell has primitive HTTP working over IPC.

7 blockers left needing patches.

Summmary

Read the latest weekly update. (none last week)

View snapshot results for startup and all other tests.

Activity

Rob Strong put up a detailed post about his startup improvements to the update service, the effect on mobile, and points out some other front-end services that could benefit from the same treatment.

Joel’s static Firefox (sans nspr and nss) is working (bug 525013), and is showing ~10% improvement in startup time on Mac. He’s moved on to improving code locality (bug 531406). However, time-ordering of symbols doesn’t seem to improve the sequentiality of the page-ins by much, so maybe more improvements there. More data on the bug.
Ben is making progress on the fastload replacement in bug 520309. Some fastload/invalidation discussion in this dev.platform thread.
Taras has patches up for service caching (bug 516085, needs review bsmedberg.
Super-fast-path-ing of Components.* needs some JS team help: (bug 512584).
bug 519445, for reducing Mac startup time spent in font system initialization, is ready to land when the tree re-opens.

More

More details on the project page.

Join us on IRC in #startup.

Plugins: landing preffed-off in mozilla-central as soon as practical. Two potential blockers:

need mochitest-ipcplugins enabled on mozilla-central, bug 530522 (catlee)

Tp4 test intermittently hanging, possibly tab-related and doesn’t need to block (smaug)

blockers for turning OOPP on by default, especially note

Talos process tracking, bug 529137… needs review by Alice and then landing (will require downtime)

bug 531860: .drawWindow with OOPP fails, needs owner
bug 519541: need to collect crash statistics from the plugin process; don’t necessarily need the final UI, but stability statistics will be very important… ted do you have time?
Would like to get this turned on and an alpha/beta out by mid-December, though workweek activities may delay that.

Networking: jduell has channels working in a primitive way (not yet landed): beginning to ramp up other help (fred) to help hook up loadgroups and get fennec working. Honza posted initial patches for async redirect handling in necko: bug 513086

Help with making debug tests green on mac and windows bug 523385

3rd try: this week will reset try repo.
Thanks to all those who traded in their old minis. We added a bunch more to Try Talos, and have enough left over to start work on Talos on 64-bit Linux.
40 new n810s added, bringing our total to 80.

Firebug – 2 open blockers, one with a fix in place.

blocks list

bug 468506 should block

Blocklist reminder – channel all blocklist requests through the existing addons.mozilla.org:Blocklisting component. We prefer to block things at the plugin/addon level instead of the DLL level, so let’s have everything go through the same channel for the time being.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2009-12-01“ [Less]

Boris Zbarsky: Selective quoting (or "Is it all about the military-industrial complex?")

Posted 4 days ago by bzbarsky

I recently read a famous presidential speech for the first time, and was struck by how selectively it is remembered and quoted. What I see as the key predictive quotes from the speech:

In the councils of government, we must guard against ... [More] the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

and

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

That first part comes up a lot both in public discourse and in offhand references. The second, not so much. Yet looking back now, almost 50 years after President Eisenhower's farewell address, I'm struck by how clearly he saw the future on both issues, and how poorly we've fared on the less-publicized one. Even more poorly than on the publicized one, in my opinion. That ought not to be a surprise, I suppose.

The full speech is well-worth reading; it compares quite favorably with what passes for political speeches nowadays. [Less]

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Love Add-ons? Love Marketing? Join our team!

Posted 4 days ago by Nick Nguyen

We’re looking for a stellar marketeer to join the Add-ons team. As readers of this blog know, Add-ons are an integral part of the Firefox experience for millions of users worldwide. If you’re a fan of Add-ons and you are great at marketing ... [More] , we’d like to meet you.

More details below:

Responsibilities:

Build deep consumer insights based on current Add-on user base
Create overall Add-ons positioning and messaging for consumers in multiple global markets
Conduct competitive analysis of addons.mozilla.org and other online software distribution environments
Investigate and recommend opportunities for better ongoing application integration with Add-ons
Identify, evaluate and manage greenfield growth opportunities (whether product, partnership or marketing-based)
Provide support to Add-on developer relations team

Requirements:

Serious passion for Firefox and Add-ons
3-5 years of relevant experience in consumer online marketing
Willingness to experiment and take educated gambles
Current on social media and Web marketing strategies and tools
Experience in marketing casual games / lightweight apps a plus
Previous startup experience a plus
Previous open source experience a plus

Apply on the Mozilla Careers site. Join us and make Add-ons even bigger than they are today!

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Jeff Walden: An exercise in XPCOM stream programming

Posted 4 days ago by Jeff

If you’ve done any programming with XPCOM, at some time you’ve probably had to work with streams. A little background in case you haven’t, then a small thought exercise:

Streams
A stream is an object from which you read data or to ... [More] which you write data. In XPCOM an input stream stream is a stream from which you read data; an output stream is a stream to which you write data. In an ideal world a stream is either open (indicating data may be read or written to it) or closed (indicating that the stream is no longer readable, or that no more data can be written to it), and that’s all there is to it. File objects in Python function very much like ideal streams.

In the real world, truly useful streams have further limitations (or characteristics). How much data can be read from an input stream right now? Can a given amount of data be written to an output stream right now? Should reading or writing proceed until completion when right now isn’t possible but sometime later might be, or should it halt immediately with an error indicating that reading or writing would block program execution? One might ignore these concerns in simplistic scenarios such as those which short Python scripts might be used to address. In complex applications, particularly those which must remain responsive to user input, these concerns may be quite important. You can’t display a useful progress bar if the stream you’re reading from represents the download of a 3GB file over a slow network and reading from the stream blocks program execution.

Streams which immediately halt with an error when reading or writing would block execution are nonblocking streams. Efficient use of such streams requires a way to wait until the desired amount of data can be written to or read from a stream. XPCOM efficiently supports nonblocking streams through an asyncWait method which will notify at some later time when the desired amount of data can be written to or read from the stream, without blocking. At the moment there are two flavors of asynchronous waiting: waiting until the desired amount can be read or written, and waiting until the given stream has been closed. At the interface level, the former is indicated by flags = 0, while the latter is indicated by flags = WAIT_CLOSURE_ONLY.

The Exercise
Suppose you wish to complete one conceptually simple task in stream programming: copying a stream, i.e. reading all data from one stream and writing it all into another, where both streams are nonblocking. (Such a copier might buffer data read before it can be immediately written; assume this is a requirement for the purposes of this exercise.) Suppose for the moment that there is no readily available implementation of the nsIAsyncStreamCopier interface, so you have to roll your own stream copier. In what situation is it necessary to asynchronously wait with flags = WAIT_CLOSURE_ONLY to efficiently implement stream copying?

Hints
If you want a hint (arguably the answer, if you can interpret the code), take a look at the uses of WAIT_CLOSURE_ONLY in xpcom/io/nsStreamUtils.cpp. You may perhaps find further hints in bug 513854, the bug which brought this somewhat quirky need for flags = WAIT_CLOSURE_ONLY to my attention.

Questions?
I come to this problem with more experience and familiarity with streams than most people will have. If anything in the above description is unclear, ask questions in the comment section — I did the best I could to make the problem and its background understandable, but I may easily have done so less well than intended. [Less]