03.16.09
Camino 2009 Week 6-11
It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write a weekly Camino update—a month and a half, if you believe the calendar. However, we’ve been working on lots of exciting bugs and features in that time, many of which are already available in the nightlies.
- In case you missed the announcement (or the software update notification), we released Camino 2.0 Beta 2 on February 27. That release contained Ilya Sherman’s Growl integration work and a number of Gecko fixes that made milestone life a lot more pleasant.
- In addition to his ever-present reviewing and superreviewing, Stuart Morgan hacked on diverse areas of the codebase. He updated our software update feed-generation script to fully support multiple branches and polished off one of the follow-up bugs for the safe browsing feature. Stuart also investigated several possible causes of shutdown crashes and reduced the likelihood that various Gecko objects related to our UI could cause crashes when quitting Camino. Finally, he spent some time poking Core regressions that adversely affected Camino and whipped up a quick patch to make our default browser detection more robust on factory-fresh Mac OS X 10.5 systems.
- Sean Murphy has been busy working on bringing the safe browsing implementation up to shipping quality. He reworked the initial Gecko-based implementation in order to make the new feature localizable, and he’s been working on abstracting the code that runs our current “transient bars” (the Find bar and the pop-up blocker bar) so that it can better support new types of bars, such as the one that will arrive with safe browsing. In addition, Sean revised his patch to speed up the tab dragging code and fixed a dragging-related drawing problem with background tabs on 10.4.
- Christopher Henderson has posted a couple of iterations of his patch to add Flashblock whitelisting to the context menu of blocked Flash objects. He has also investigated a bookmark bar appearance regression on Mac OS X 10.4 and helped out with reviews, branch backports, and whatever other code questions I threw his way.
- After taking a breather for homework after finishing the Growl integration, Ilya Sherman continued finding, fixing, and reviewing patches for download-related bugs during the past few weeks. His latest patch finally resolves the longstanding complaint that we fail to scroll to a sane place in the Downloads window when restoring the window after launch. Ilya also discovered an additional performance problem with Flash that wasn’t resolved by last month’s Gecko fixes.
- When he was not flying, Chris Lawson continued work on his downloads preferences migration bug. With help from one of our forum regulars, he also finally got to the bottom of a bizarre bug that had caused the cookies sheet to fail to open in certain cases (a website had set an invalid cookie) and coded up a fix. Chris also helped investigate several other bizarre bugs that appeared during this timeframe and reviewed some of the patches that fixed them.
- Jeff Dlouhy reported some progress on his Tabsposé bugs, and he also posted a revised in-progress patch for integrating Quick Look into the Downloads window.
- Philippe Wittenbergh has been working on polishing the appearance of our error page overlays. Way back at the beginning of this reporting period, he produced a final set of full content zoom toolbar icons after we (finally!) came to a decision on the style and color that we wanted. Philippe has also helped investigate and tirage many of the bugs that have been filed during this time.
- In addition to driving Camino 2.0 Beta 2 last month, I’ve been coordinating the forthcoming Camino 1.6.7 security and stability release. I’ve also worked with Flashblock developer Philip Chee to investigate several Flashblock-related bugs discovered by Camino users and to push Philip’s fixes into our builds. In addition, I finally got to land my long-suffering patch to make Camino use maintained XUL theme files so that things like error page buttons no longer look deformed.
Whew! A month-and-a-half is a little bit too much time between updates.
One final note for tonight: it’s Summer of Code time again (an entirely different type of March Madness for college students), so if you’re a student, please keep Camino in mind for your project application for this summer; if you’re no longer a college or university student, we’re also soliciting ideas for potential projects from all of our users. Mike Pinkerton will be writing more about this in the near future, so keep watching his blog for the full set of details about submitting your ideas and for the Camino Project’s own list of sample project ideas.