The roads I take...

I've recently enlisted into the Mozilla Reps ("ReMo") program, mainly to procure sponsoring by Mozilla for the 1st European OpenStreetMap conference, known as "State of the Map - Europe" (SotM-EU).



I'll be the sole representative this weekend of Mozilla being one of the major sponsors of this event, and I'm also helping somewhat with organizational matters, as my colleagues from the "OpenStreetMap Austria" association are the organizers of the conference.

It will be an interesting role to represent Mozilla, and I'm very proud of that, as this gives me a chance to talk a lot about the one thing in Mozilla I'm most passionate about: our mission.
Supporting a conference on an open, innovative project that creates opportunities for everyone on the web and beyond goes to the heart of what Mozilla is, and I couldn't be happier about being present there.



Things start off with a public pre-event discussion tomorrow evening and the conference itself is taking place from Friday to Sunday, so don't expect to see me online a lot in the next few days, I'm exploring this strange place called "real life" with other geeks - and probably mapping it out some more.

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 27/2011 (July 4 - 10, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Continued calculations of more real crash rates for recent release and beta versions.
  Discussed with the Socorro team on getting improved graphs.
  Followed the source uplift and new version coming out of it, useful data from the new version is only to come in the upcoming week.
  Stayed in the loop on GC crash instrumentation, MethodJIT fixes and MemShrink outcomes that all could or should influence crash data.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  Helped Callek to get the final 2.2 release out the door, including website updates as Jens was on vacation.
  Got Linux64 updates going for 2.0.*->2.0.14 and 2.1*->2.2, major update will follow once it goes public for the other systems as well.
  I also helped to get the major update billboards up on a https website (mozilla.org, in this case).
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Went through the first round of sign-offs for aurora 2.4 and beta 2.3 for SeaMonkey.
• German L10n:
  Updated the German website for SeaMonkey 2.2, and synched DOMi, SeaMonkey and toolkit localizations for all of -central, -aurora, and -beta.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Source uplift, input/feedback sites and non-supported browsers, new release process and "enterprise" users, MeeGo N900 CE, N9/Harmattan/MeeGo and Firefox mobile, Mozilla sponsorship for SotM-EU, etc.

I feel we start moving more and more in directions to improve the situation with crashes on Firefox by attacking some of the larger areas where we are seeing problems - unfortunately, we have three large areas where the "signature" doesn't tell us a lot about what the actual problem was (GC and MethodJIT crashes as well as plugin hangs) and so those areas are hard to work on and need more instrumentation. Still, we are moving there as well. Reducing memory usages in MemShrink should help reducing out-of-memory crashes. And we just uplifted another version to the Beta channel, which should get it finally exposed to enough users to do good crash analysis. If you want to see more interesting work, though, you should check out Aurora, which already contains some more of that work on memory usage, etc. I love working in an area where you see things really moving toward getting better!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 26/2011 (June 27 - July 3, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Continued calculations of more real crash rates for the 5.0 release.
  Discussions and planning of how to get better graphs and reports directly in Socorro for all channels in the future.
  More looks at 5.0 data to find if anything bad comes up - so far we look quite good.
  Had a meeting with JS team members to discuss how we can instrument and attack GC crashes.
  Continued looks at Flash hang report rates by Flash version, more investigation will come when I have time.
  Followed discussions on a fix for a high-ranking MethodJIT crash often seen with the new Yahoo! Mail.
  Followed the Socorro 2.0 release.
  Continued discussions on that large GC fix that impacts memory usage and possibly OOM crashes, but it will not be rushed into the next release, making the normal process, probably.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  Helped Callek some more to get 2.2 Betas moving forward and final coming near.
  Tried to get Linux64 updates going, looks like the manual tries worked, the automated ones possibly not.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  More work on L10n sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta, the amount of locales in 2.2 seem to get to match 2.1 almost or even completely.
• German L10n:
  Cared to get all the 2.2 Betas up on the German website, and the Release Notes updated.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  "Firefox in the enterprise" discussions, testing Linux 3.0 Mozilla build fix, MeeGo N900 CE, N9/Harmattan/MeeGo and Firefox mobile, securing Mozilla sponsorship for SotM-EU, etc.

The upcoming week, we're uplifting the source once again and finally are completely in the new release schedule - from now on, every six weeks there will be an update part of the continuing security and feature support series of Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. I was even quoted on an LWN.net weekly security page for putting the new process that way.

As mentioned, SeaMonkey is following that as well, albeit with different version numbers, the 2.2 version that is on the same level with Firefox 5 and Thunderbird 5 is coming in the next days, 2.3 and the following versions should be even more in sync with the respective releases of our cousins, or brothers, or whatever y'all wanna call 'em.

And right before 2.2 went into its final stages, I even managed to write up my personal thoughts on SeaMonkey 2.1 in a blog post. It was - and is - an interesting and, if I may say so, awesome ride I had and still have with Mozilla in general, SeaMonkey, and Firefox!

I know, we are already 3 weeks past the release of SeaMonkey 2.1, and we'll actually see a 2.2 release next week, but I wanted to get some words up here about 2.1, given that I had been project coordinator and release manager for most of its release cycle.

In the end, it was Callek who built the release and InvisibleSmiley who updated the website, though I did send the announcements - but as always with SeaMonkey, it has been a simply great achievement of an all-volunteer community, and I would like all the great people in that team for all they did and continue to do.

That release was a somewhat emotional moment for me - I have said for a few months that this would be "my last release", and even if I didn't do the final steps in the end, I have been working a lot since 2.0 to make this happen before transitioning over to working on Firefox crash analysis for Mozilla.

I even did some UI and build system code work, including some heavy lifting and some very visible code, for example lightweight themes (Personas) support, defaulting to tabbed browsing, switching to places bookmarks, turning on out-of-process plugins, adding the Data Manager, OpenSearch support, using omnijar, and an optional search bar and an OpenSearch engine manage, not to speak of the release engineering and management work.

This brought SeaMonkey up to date with Firefox 4 not only in the platform and in the web-facing parts, but also in many other user-facing features - and even added a unique feature that Firefox doesn't offer by default (Data Manager).

I also organized a first SeaMonkey Developer Meeting in October 2010, where the core team had a great opportunity to talk about the past, present and future of the project and, most importantly, meet face to face. This showed what a cool, diverse, and great group there is at the heart of SeaMonkey, but it also made me think even more deeply about my personal priorities.

For several years I coordinated a vibrant community project, and with the 2.1 release, it has delivered a really great product, starting a new era - the updates will follow in faster succession and be even closer in time and code to what Firefox is shipping.

For myself, it also marked the start of a new era as I passed the baton on project coordination back to the collective of the SeaMonkey Council and the great volunteer team and community, which I trust to make the project continue doing great Internet suites for quite some time to come.

I learned a lot in this project, and the project management experience there made it possible for me to now work in program management at Mozilla to help making Firefox more stable than ever before. I'm very passionate about the Mozilla mission and believe this is the best way I can make a difference to support it and drive it further to success, but I'll still be in reach to help and support SeaMonkey as part of my free time - just not in such a prominent role. I'll still be around in discussions, do small things here and there, esp. in support of Callek in release engineering, work on the Data Manager as well as some other add-ons that work in both SeaMonkey and Firefox - and I'll try to make "the official Mozilla" and SeaMonkey work together as well as possible.

This is a great release, project and community, I thank you all for making all that possible, for supporting me and us all over the years, and I hope you will take care well of this baby I helped to grow up and that you will help it grow even more mature over the next few years!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 25/2011 (June 20 - 26, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Made instrumentation for finding out something that is nearer to the real crash rate of the 5.0 final build than what calculation on a single throttle rate could tell.
  Investigated how Socorro finds it crash rates to know what numbers of mine to compare to and saw how convoluted that code currently is.
  Looked at 5.0 crash data to see if anything sticks out.
  Attended the new Firefox release launch broadcast.
  Looked at my Flash hang reports and saw the trend I saw in the first reports go on. Will need to do further investigation there soon.
  More discussions on JS crashes, trying to work the JS team to get to instrumentation and fixes there.
  Met with the CrashKill team to discuss my proposals for Q3 priorities we see in Socorro work and forwarded that draft to the Socorro team.
  Engaged in discussions on a GC fix that should reduce Firefox memory usage and out-of-memory crashes, but has some risk for being fast-tracked into Aurora and Beta.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  Helped Callek to get 2.2 Betas moving forward.
  Checked in my patch for removing branch hacks from comm-central.
• SeaMonkey 2.1 UI:
  I had a number of discussions on SeaMonkey 2.1 code I worked on, including the new zoom backend support and Data Manager - bugs and ideas have been brought forward, other people might work on improvements to the work I started there, which is a good sign after all.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Worked on more L10n sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta, more and more locales are joining the train.
• German Mozilla Community:
  I pushed the new design for the German Planet Mozilla, as we now have mozilla.de in that new design as well.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  New Firefox process in the Enterprise (including the actual discussion this is mocking), Linux 3.0 Mozilla build bustage, more SeaMonkey 2.1 release feedback, MemShrink and memory reporting, user volume on Aurora and Beta, MeeGo N900 CE, N9/Harmattan announcement, Mozilla sponsorship for SotM-EU, getting SSL to run on a first domain on my own web server, etc.

A lot of things happened this week, including good and bad messaging in the press for Mozilla, as we held the promise to go for faster release cycles. There is a lot of hope, but also fear, uncertainty, and doubt out there, both in our community and the wider public. We need to address that, but I think we can. I'm excited about the new process because we have an unprecedented time of only stability and polish work on every release when they are in Aurora and even more in Beta stage, and we can really concentrate on doing good crash analysis and catching of nasty bugs there. For this release, we weren't yet confident to call it the most stable release of Firefox ever, but following this new process, we will soon be able to say that based on real data we have. I'm really looking forward to that and to being part of this great story.
And to everyone who still has fears, uncertainties and doubts about it, try to think about how you could embrace this new process of a lot of small steps and only after careful analysis and weighing against taking huge leaps with more time, where you are more prone to stumble when you finally move. Let's try to stay positive and think about how we can make things better on the base of what we have now instead of how a new thing could make some part of the world collapse. Let's stay positive and let's make this world more modern and replace doing revolutions after long times of stagnation with evolving more continuously instead. I believe that could help everyone

Inspired by dolske's great post on Enterprise integration for Firefox (thanks for mentioning my work!) I have been thinking and found that I have all the means to present just how well the new Firefox release process fits into the Enterprise:



That said, I really think it fits even into other enterprises and we should help them come along on that great ride into the future and our ongoing voyage on the Mozilla mission.

(P.S.: Thanks to dolske for the great train of thought and to Paramount for the great DVD set of the recent Star Trek movie that I could use for the picture.)

Rechtzeitig zum Erscheinen von Firefox 5 ist jetzt mozilla.de mit neuem Inhalt und Design verfürgbar, als zentrale Stelle, die zu den deutschsprachiugen Community-Angeboten weist.

Dazu passend wurde jetzt der deutsche "Planet Mozilla", der Blog-Aggregator der deutschsprachigen Mozilla-Gemeinschaft, auch auf das neue Design umgestellt - Dank an Elchi3 dafür!

Wie schon früher beschrieben freuen wir uns über weitere Blogs aus der deutschsprachigen Mozilla-Gemeinschaft, die wir hier aufnehmen können!

Technology. The current frontier. These are the voyages of June 21st, it's ongoing mission to find strange new releases, new devices, and new software. To boldly go where no day has gone before...


This is surely an interesting day. Nokia has just presented the Linux-powered Nokia N9 with a completely new UI and it's surely a very slick device, interesting UI concept, and no matter if system-wise this midway point between Maemo5 and full-fledged MeeGo can be called "MeeGo" legally, having a mass-market phone out there that comes with a fully open "real Linux" is awesome.
The N900, which feels old, slow and clunky nowadays, has a damn good successor - even though the keyboard-attached N950 version has been blocked by carriers and is only available as a "loaned" dev kit to people creating N9 apps. I hope to see that N9 device out there soon, and perhaps it's done well enough that the absence of the keyboard can be taken, but I'd really need to test it for that. Also, I hope that enough of the UI stuff can be opened enough that MeeGo proper can ship it as well. Until all that clears up, I'll keep testing the MeeGo N900 Community Edition, which is shaping up nicely as well. Hopefully open-software phones have a future with all those moves (and I surely hope other vendors will chime in as well, as Nokia can't be fully trusted in that way any more).

But there's much more: I just saw Mozilla people on the US West Coast join IRC at 5am their time and start their work day - Firefox 5 is going public today as the first one off our new release process. While it doesn't ship a lot in terms of new features, the big thing here is that it kickstarts the new process that will get us new Firefox releases every 6-12 weeks that are easy to update to because they don't have a ton of new stuff but still a number of nice features. This time, CSS Animations are probably the only larger thing (next to performance improvements), and most users won't notice them yet, unless they look for some demos. But, the important point is that they're ready and so we can ship them to hundreds of millions of people, not needing to wait for a major version coming in a year or so. It's (going) out there, right now!
This is also the first release I have been there in "Crash Scene Investigation" for its whole cycle, and we learned a lot about a number of things in this cycle, including that we need to attract more people to the Aurora and Beta channels to get even better data, but also that there are some classes of crashes and hangs we need to take a closer look at, and we are doing that. All in all, our beta numbers of Firefox 5 have been quite good, we expect it to be at least as stable as Firefox 4.0.1, probably somewhat better.

In addition to this, Mozilla is shipping the probably last security update to Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird ships a security update for 3.1, and, very importantly, Firefox 5 also ships for Android and the before-mentioned N900 (maemo5) today, right at the same time with the desktop Firefox!

Not enough, though: The SeaMonkey team has just finished up building the first beta of SeaMonkey 2.2 and will ship that to its beta testers later today. This version has the same web-facing features as Firefox 5 (including CC Animations) and the security fixes shipped in other versions today, as well as a number of smaller fixes to SeaMonkey code, some of which have been found since 2.1 has been released.
I'm informed that the team will try to ship the final 2.2 release as soon as possible in the next weeks, hoping that this first beta will do well in testing.

And it's surely possible that this day has even more in store, it's not over yet!

Engage!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2011 (June 13 - 19, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Looked at data of new 5.0 beta builds, but there was a problem with the update system so uptake was a bit slow. Still, the more users we have on beta, the better the data looks.
  Did run some investigation on hangs and Flash versions and preliminary could find that the 10.3 versions of Flash seem to be more prone to hang than older versions. This also would explain why 5.0 has a higher hang rate than 4.0.1, as users on beta are more likely to have newer Flash versions installed.
  Discussed JS PGO a lot, and even though I still am pretty sure it doesn't make us crashier, we'll probably end up turning it off on Aurora as well and first look into more GC and MethodJIT crash instrumentation before we flip that switch again.
  As always, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  Proposed for us to go directly to 2.2 with major updates from 2.0 and therefore double up on pushing 2.2 out soon, Callek and others seem to agree.
  Helped getting aurora builds on track, among other things by updating the automated update system (AUS) server we use, so it recognizes by-channel settings.
  When I first made trunk updates going, I introduced a typo that broke updates but I solved that fast after it got reported.
  For 2.2b1, I helped getting the initial update config files in place so that we ship automated updates to all 2.1 (beta and final) users that are on the beta channel.
  On the build system side, I did a patch on removing the Mozilla-branch-based switches from comm-central.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Sent another message to the L10n list and accepted more L10n sign-offs for 2.2 beta, most locales we shipped in 2.1 seem to be on track to get into 2.2 as well - at least I hope to hear back soon from those that aren't accepted in yet.
• Themes:
  I spent a number of additional hours working, and finally, could update my personal theme page to have the new 2.1 versions of the EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes announced! Reviews on addons.mozilla.org are still pending, but I did upload them there as well - both work with SeaMonkey 2.1 and probably well enough with the newer versions as well, and in addition, LCARStrek now supports Firefox 4 (and probably newer ones) as well!
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Lists across multiple domains in Data Manager, hg precommit hooks for bug numbers in commit messages, update to Linux 3.0-rc kernels and seeing compile problems now due to that and a different bug, SeaMonkey 2.1 release feedback, MemShrink and memory reporting, errors and assertions, beta build turnaround speed, MeeGo N900 CE testing, sponsorship for SotM-EU, etc.

Things are moving fast in Mozilla land - while SeaMonkey just released 2.1 last week, we've been using that one to get "2.3a2" builds from aurora to work and update correctly and get ready for doing the first and potentially last beta for 2.2, which should go for a release within the next 2 weeks or so.

And Firefox is releasing 5.0 tomorrow! I'm excited to see how it does on crashes, as this is the first release on which I've been around in "Crash Scene Investigation" the whole cycle. So far we are looking good, but we still have way fewer users on Aurora and Beta than we would like to have for comprehensive pre-release crash analysis, so the first days of sending it out to users will give us a better picture. Given that changes compared to Firefox 4 are small and the beta numbers we have so far are looking really good, I expect this to be a smooth release in terms of stability - but I'm standing by to help figure things out in case that will not be the case.

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 23/2011 (June 6 - 12, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  More investigation of Firefox 5.0b2 vs. 5.0b3, but mostly waiting for data on 5.0b5 to come to a conclusion about this upcoming release. We still have too few people on the Beta and Aurora channels to make good and swift assessments of crashiness, though.
  Still concerned about the hang volume on 5.0, we'll need to put more investigation into this.
  Came to the conclusion that turning off PGO for JS between 5.0b2 and 5.0b3 probably did not change the crash volume, but only shifted crash locations back to well-known signatures (affects mostly GC and MethodJIT crashes).
  Found a significant decrease of hangs on trunk some time ago, which in turn led to realizing that the problem it fixed affected Aurora and the fix needed to land there as well.
  Of course, looked into "explosive"/rising crashes with my experimental stats.
  Worked with the bmo and Socorro people to push and verify the new Crash Signature field in Bugzilla.
  Made sure the bugs targeted at the Socorro 1.9 milestone are not forgotten as that release is dropped.
  Started work on Q3 priorities/goals to hand to the Socorro team.
• Jökulsárlón Download Manager
  The new 0.4 version I submitted last week just got review and is now available on AMO!
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  I helped Callek with a small things to get 2.1 final done and out the door, including the fix of a glitch in update generation.
  Got a decision and implemented the version bump on post-2.1 trees.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Accepted a few L10n sign-offs for 2.2 beta.
• German L10n:
  Updated inspector L10n, readied language packs for ChatZilla and venkman for AMO, updated trunk localization.
  Localized the 2.1 announcement, corrected localized relnotes, and made 2.1 public for German as well.
• Themes:
  Did some more work on LCARStrek for Firefox 4, this is starting to look good.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Ad/malware crashes, non-granted reviews on FF search code and changed dataman invocation, SeaMonkey 2.1 release feedback, mozilla-inbound, multi-process tabs, MemShrink, beta build turnaround speed, MeeGo N900 DE becoming Community Edition (CE), making desktop layout more fitting for full-HD resolution, etc.

The big news for this week surely is that SeaMonkey 2.1 has finally been released! The last few weeks have been a bit bumpy, with various packaging and installer issues, and it's still a bit unclear if all of them have been resolved, but we've finally done it. I was more involved in the final shipping than what I should, but Callek's TODO list is piling up and I could help with a few small tasks that made things run more smoothly and faster overall, so I did that. This is a somewhat emotional moment for me, as I have considered 2.1 "my last SeaMonkey release" for some time, but I want to address this in a separate post (hope I find time for it).

And in terms of my "Crash Scene Investigation" work, things are shaping up nicely, from closely watching Firefox 5 via tooling improvements to working on goals for the next quarter, a lot of items are moving - and that's always a good sign.