09.26.08
Posted in Camino at 8:16 pm by Smokey
We froze yesterday evening in preparation for Camino 2.0 Alpha 1. This means that other than release notes (and possibly any somehow-yet-undiscovered critical bugs), we won’t be landing any new features or fixes before the release of 2.0a1.
If you’re a nightly user or someone interested in helping test, please download today’s nightly build and use it over the next few days. Please let us know if you find any serious problems, either by filing a bug or posting in the forum. While these nightlies are still alpha-quality software (technically, pre-alpha 
) and many of the new features are not yet fully functional, we aren’t aware of any serious issues, but we also haven’t had a large group of people using these builds on a regular basis.
N.B. If you haven’t been using 2.0a1pre nightlies already, be sure to make a backup of your profile folder (~/Library/Application Support/Camino) before using a nightly, since the Gecko version used by these nightlies makes several irreversible and incompatible changes to your profile, preventing a profile touched by a 2.0-series build from being used with 1.6.x again.
Thanks to all of our nightly build users, testers, and bug-filers, and we hope to deliver an exciting Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 to everyone very soon.
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09.23.08
Posted in Camino at 9:54 pm by Smokey
Today we released Camino 1.6.4, the latest security and stability update for Camino 1.6.x. As always, everyone running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher should upgrade, and the software update feature will notify you of the release within the next 24 hours.
We’re especially delighted to have Catalan join the languages shipping in the Camino Multilingual edition. Thanks to Albert Martí, Jordi Simó, and the rest of the Catalan team for their efforts!
If you’re interested in translating Camino into your language, please visit the caminol10n project and join the mailing list. The list of registered contributors may even have others who can help you, or there may even be a localization effort underway that you can help complete. We hope to see your language in Camino Multilingual soon!
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09.22.08
Posted in Camino at 12:07 am by Smokey
We had another productive week this week as we pushed towards Camino 2.0 Alpha 1.
- Stuart Morgan landed a bit of code early last week to make Tabsposé appear more quickly and spent some time this weekend finally hooking the feature up in the main menu. He also developed a patch to add a “Recently Closed Tabs” sub-menu to the History menu, worked on integrating the latest version of Sparkle, and joined in the bug-fixing related to Friday’s keyboard loop landing. Stuart also performed his usual complement of reviews and super-reviews.
- This week fearless build-wrangler Mark Mentovai built the Camino 1.6.4 release candidate and later solved a serious case of missing tinderbox mail.
- Sean Murphy’s new keyboard loop for the main browser window landed this week and fixed no fewer than a dozen bugs, the oldest dating to June 2002. He’s been working on fixing the regressions and other bugs that have turned up in early testing, and he’s also been working on another project and doing some reviews.
- Chris Lawson has continued to attack assorted smaller bugs, fixing problems with an obscure Preferences window property list key and with the site icon in the location bar getting out of sync with the site in displayed in the tab. He also whipped up a patch to migrate our NSUserDefaults hidden preference for inline autocomplete to the Gecko preferences system.
- Christopher Henderson spent this week starting to work on implementing a fullscreen mode for Camino; rumour has it he has a working prototype and is implementing the bezel as this goes to press.
- Jeff Dlouhy spent some time dusting off bits of in-progress Tabsposé code, working on getting highlighting working in the Tabsposé view.
- This week I continued coordinating the upcoming Camino 1.6.4 release and starting to push the team toward a freeze for Camino 2.0 Alpha 1. Peter Jaros reviewed my AppleScript dictionary patch, so I landed that, as well as patches from “the two Chrises” and Sean. In addition, I filed a number of follow-up bugs on the new keyboard loop and did a few reviews. Over the weekend Stuart and I also helped one of our users get his tree working so that he could look at finishing the long-stalled Growl-for-downloads patch.
This week we should see the Camino 1.6.4 release (pending the Gecko 1.8.1.17 release), and hopefully we’ll have all the blockers landed and be frozen for 2.0a1.
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09.20.08
Posted in Camino at 12:08 am by Smokey
Earlier this evening, I landed Sean Murphy’s patches to fix the keyboard loop (or tab chain) in the main browser window. Sean’s series of patches fixes a large number of outstanding bugs related to keyboard navigation and probably for the first time in Camino’s history establishes a complete, working loop in the main browser window—certainly it’s the first time the tab bar and the pop-up blocker bar have been keyboard accessible. Great work, Sean!
There are undoubtedly still going to be edge cases that we’ve missed in the patches and the review process, and there are a few known limitations of the patch—for instance, you can’t shift-tab back through the content area on all pages—but overall, the new loop is a massive improvement both for those who use the keyboard heavily and for those who’d just like to tab from the location bar or search field to the page content reliably.
If you do run into one of the edge cases we’ve missed, where the keyboard loop breaks or jumps to an unexpected location, please file a bug (after searching to see if someone else has already filed it). We’ll try to fix them as quickly as possible and make they keyboard loop in Camino 2.0 even better.
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09.15.08
Posted in Camino at 12:05 am by Smokey
It’s been busy around here…both in the Camino Project and in my life. Since the last update, we’ve landed a couple of major patches, a dozen or so smaller ones, and pushed a number of others closer to completion.
- Stuart Morgan finished up the certificate exceptions patch and filed a number of follow-up bugs on making the behavior even more like what you’d expect in Camino. He also rewrote our HTML bookmarks parser (the previous version of which was a result of the Great Drunken Bookmarks Rewrite of ‘03 and which was constructed largely of twine, baling wire, and tequila) into something sane, which fixed all of our outstanding HTML bookmarks import bugs. In addition to those two hefty pieces of code, he performed dozens of reviews or super-reviews and wrote some auxiliary patches for Sean Murphy’s tab loop patch and for Tabsposé.
- Sean’s main focus over the past few weeks was the several bugs that make up our current stable of “tab chain” (or keyboard loop) bugs. With the all of the patches applied, the pop-up blocker bar is now in the tab chain, the Bookmark Bar no longer becomes a black hole, the Find bar is now fully in the loop, and tabs themselves are also finally accessible, too. After a couple of the component patches receive super-review, the improved loop will be ready to land.
- Chris Lawson has been patching our string cleaning code lately, fixing a number of bugs related to behavior when pasting text and URLs into the location bar and the toolbar’s search field. Side-effects of these changes also include better behavior of our “Open URL” service and improved ability to drag plain-text URLs to the Bookmark Bar to create bookmarks. He is also working on a patch to add referrer support to our “open location” AppleScript command (something last seen in Netscape-family browsers in Netscape 4).
- Following up his full content zoom work, Christopher Henderson has jumped right in to become the second half of our “dynamic Chris hacking duo.” He attacked a number of polish bugs related to 10.5 making some table cells editable when they should not be, implemented support for site icons in the location bar’s autocomplete window, and fixed several other bugs relating to the location bar. Christopher has a patch waiting for review that brings pretty UTF-8 support to URLs everywhere in Camino, and rumor has it this weekend he started investigating long-forgotten offline support.
- Over the past several weeks I’ve spent time testing and reviewing patches, committing the flood of patches coming from the two Chrises, and preparing for the 1.6.4 and 2.0a1 releases. I also did some investigation of a very strange AppleEvent-related bug I filed last year that had been bothering me lately, and with some help from Chris Lawson, Peter Jaros, and Uncle Google, I found a fix and posted a patch for review.
That about covers the exciting code from the last several weeks. In the near future we hope to have Camino 1.6.4 and Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 in your hands, so stay tuned.
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09.08.08
Posted in Camino, Life, Software at 3:36 am by Smokey
It’s been a while since I’ve done much reporting of bugs, at least not like I used to do. In my “early” years with the project, I reported all sorts of issues I found in normal usage. Later, during the march to 1.0 and the kickoff of 1.5, I filed series after series of bugs as we implemented new features and as Sam, Ian, and I retriaged years worth of existing bugs. Since then, however, I’ve spent more time triaging just-filed bugs, driving releases, and occasionally even fixing bugs. My last real spurt of bug reports came with the Cocoa native theme rewrite, which was over a year ago.
Recently, though, it feels like I’m back in bug-reporting mode, finding three bugs to report while testing a fix for one other bug. The recent Bugzilla upgrade had a few rough edges, and for whatever reason I seemed to find a number of them first. In addition to that, we recently landed some new security UI in Camino, so I’ve been poking around in some obscure areas of our interface.
The story of Camino’s security UI is a bit of a sad one; much of it is not user-facing at all (i.e., it’s not the lock icon or the location bar), and most of it is a 20% feature—one of those parts of the program that at most 20% of users need. The problem with this little bit of 20% UI is that it’s not something that can be lived without, or worked around, or implemented by an add-on, if you do need it, and as the web tends to be a mess, chances are better than usual that everyone will need to use it once. Simon probably put it best when he wrote about implementing this UI (in 2005; his post dates were all reset at some point).
In the past three years, we’ve largely left that UI in the state Simon committed it. No one paid much attention to the UI, since few people ever interacted with it. Occasionally someone filed a bug about a bit of UI polish (often one of our localizers, who had more interaction with those windows and sheets than 90% of our users), but the UI you see today in Camino is still almost entirely the bits in that initial commit. However, since the Gecko 1.9 security UI model changes forced us to rewrite some of those windows and sheets, I’ve been spending some time working through them, noting all of the bits of polish and bug-removal that the security UI missed out on when we upgraded the rest of Camino. (When Håkan started working on accessibility, he cleaned up a lot of our broken keyboard loops; similarly, Ian made a pass through all of the preference panes before Camino 1.5 to harmonize their layout and appearance.) All that poking in dark corners, in turn, led to a spurt of bug-filing on my part. It feels like old times again (well, without the late nights in Bugzilla and the constant laughs with Sam and Ian)….
In related bug-reporting news, Panic’s Steven Frank wrote an excellent guide to reporting bugs in Mac applications. There are two small qualifications that I would make: first, check the application’s bug database guidelines or “reporting a bug” web page (if any) before submitting a bug report. Some bug databases or trackers—usually systems that are completely open and public—may recommend searching existing reports before filing a bug to avoid submitting a duplicate report (not all developers have the time to spare to process duplicates). The guidelines for some trackers may even define another way to indicate you’re experiencing said bug. For instance, in Camino’s bug tracker, bugzilla.mozilla.org, filing duplicate bug reports is discouraged, and voting is the preferred mechanism for indicating that the bug affects you, too, and you want to see it fixed.
Second, make sure the developer is set up to receive that video file you’ve made of yourself reproducing the bug. Don’t attach the video to your initial email to the developer’s support address; instead, post the video on your own website or use YouTube—that’s got to be a better use of Google’s bandwidth than stupid pet tricks.
All in all, it’s a superb guide, and I encourage you to read it before reporting your next bug. Remember, good bug reports are good for everyone!
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