11.18.09
Posted in Camino
at 7:05 pm
by Smokey
If you’re reading this, it means that yet another major version of Camino is now in the wild. Today we released Camino 2 (codenamed ☢, because our first choice of “kittens” didn’t have a Unicode glyph) after over a year in development. There are a number of major architectural changes under the hood that should make your overall browsing experience much better, and on top of that we’ve added a number of exciting new features. It has, once again, been a long(er-than-expected) journey, but we’re very proud of all the work we’ve put into Camino 2 and are pleased to offer you a new stable release.
The road to Camino 2 began in April of 2008 when we wrapped up work on Camino 1.6, although we had been performing architectural maintenance and related work to keep up with Gecko 1.9 changes since late 2007 (and some of the changes in Gecko itself were made all the way back in 2005, after the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH was cut on August 12, 2005). Over the last year and a half, we’ve fixed more than 450 “bugs” (problems or new features), and 16 different people contributed patches for this release (Stuart Morgan again led the way with 119 fixes). Sean Murphy implemented three major features this release (tab dragging, phishing and malware protection, and rewritten Full Keyboard Access support in the browser window), and Christopher Henderson and Ilya Sherman showed up to implement full content zoom and Growl notifications for downloads, respectively, and stuck around to fix over four dozen other bugs between them. Big thanks also to the one-third of that list of patch contributors who aren’t regular Camino developers; every little fix helps make Camino a better browser.
In some ways Camino 2 isn’t the revolutionary release we hoped it would be when we wrapped up Camino 1.6, but it’s still a vast improvement over Camino 1.6 and a triumph for an all-volunteer, all-free-time development team in today’s world of corporate-sponsored browsers.
Thanks to our hard-working localization teams, Camino 2 is available today in US English and 13 other languages, with Polish expected to join that list as soon as our Polish localizer’s Mac is repaired. Sadly, we had a few languages that shipped in Camino 1.6 disappear on us, so if your language is missing, please stop by the caminol10n mailing list and see how you can help bring these localizations back. (As I mentioned earlier this year, the work doesn’t require much specialized computer/software knowledge; you and a friend can bring Camino to thousands of users in your language! For Camino 2, new contributors successfully revived the Danish localization, which was in Camino 1.0 but disappeared from Camino 1.5.)
This year I again went to bed the night before release while fearless webmaster Samuel Sidler stayed up putting the finishing touches on the home page, the Features page, and implementing the new website design from the folks at Clearleft. One of these years both Sam and I are going to get a full night’s sleep before a major release, but this was not to be that year. Aside from a few things here and there, it seems like the website and webserver bits went more smoothly this release than with 1.6.
What’s next? Those of us who have been working on the website and release details for the past month or so are going to take a little rest. Parts of the development team, which wrapped up development with a late-October push, are already starting to work on new features for Camino 2.1. Nightly builds already include Dan Weber’s 2009 Summer of Code work on location bar autocomplete, and we have some early plans for other features in Camino 2.1 (we’re always looking for contributors, so if you’re interested in helping make a great Mac browser, stop by the Contribute page or find us on irc).
In the meantime, enjoy Camino 2.0 and let us know what you think!
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11.17.09
Posted in Camino, Software
at 12:34 am
by Smokey
Many of you might have noticed that, after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.2, Camino 2.0b4, Camino 2.0rc1, or Camino 2.0.1pre/2.1a1pre nightly builds have started crashing on launch or shortly after launch, perhaps as the first page was loading. (Some of you may have noticed these crashes ever since Mac OS X 10.6 arrived, but the font changes in Mac OS X 10.6.2 seem to have made the crashes much more widespread.) You might even be one of the people who have submitted one of these crash reports.
I have some good news and some bad news about these crashes. The good news is that we’ve been looking at the problem for a while now, and Mozilla’s font gurus, John Daggett and Jonathan Kew have a couple of theories about the cause of the crashes (probably Mac OS X font cache corruption, yay! 
). In addition, we generally know how individuals can “fix” the cause of the crashes on their own Macs.
The bad news is that the individual “fix” so effective that we aren’t currently in contact with anyone who is still experiencing this problem, and reversing the “fix” doesn’t cause the crash to reappear. This makes it much more difficult to determine what exactly is wrong and to find the best way to fix the Mozilla code to make whatever the underlying problem is not crash Camino, now or in the future, for everyone.
If you’re currently experiencing this crash, we could use your help. There are questions in need of some answers, and we’ll probably be able to generate some test builds (to log additional information and eventually to test proposed fixes) soon. Please comment in bug 514114 if you’re seeing this crash. (If you can’t get Camino to launch in order to check about:crashes for your crash ids, you can open the Camino inside the Breakpad folder inside the Library folder in your users’s Home folder and look for files with names in the format of CrashID=bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108.dmp; paste the bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 part into the search field on crash-stats to find your report.)
Finally, if you just want to make the problem go away and can’t help us track down the cause of the crash, you should open Font Book, check for and resolve any duplicate fonts (in the menu), and validate all of your fonts, removing any ones that Font Book flags as having problems (in the menu). You may also need to restart your Mac after removing duplicate and corrupted fonts.
Thanks for your help investigating this crash; we hope we’ll soon be able to make Camino stop crashing for everyone who is, or will be, experiencing this problem on Mac OS X 10.6.
Update (2009-11-17): John came up with a patch that should fix the crash, and it was reviewed and approved this evening. The fix should appear in tomorrow’s (2009-11-18) Camino 2.0.1pre, 2.1a1pre, and Firefox 3.0.16pre nightly builds.
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11.09.09
Posted in Camino, Software
at 1:58 am
by Smokey
As we move ever-closer to the release of Camino 2, I wanted to revisit the subject of crash reporting. A few years ago, I wrote about crash reporting and how to help fight crashes with Talkback, our decrepit crash-reporting system from the early years of this century. I realized a few months ago that if you started using Camino around or after the release of Camino 1.0, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen Talkback, since part of its decrepit nature was its PPC-only binary, and Camino 1.0 coincided with the beginning of the transition to Intel-based Macs. Now that Camino 2 includes modern crash reporting based on Google Breakpad (tip o’ the hat to mento for bootstrapping modern open-source crash reporting), users with Intel Macs may be experiencing Camino crash reporting for the first time, so it’s a good time to revisit what you should do to help us find and fix crashing bugs.
Like Talkback before it, the Breakpad-based Camino Crash Reporter collects data about your crash and, when you agree, sends the data to Mozilla servers, where we (the Camino team) get to see the information in aggregate (and non-personal information in individual crash incidents).
How crash reporting works in Camino 2
If Camino crashes, the Camino Crash Reporter pops up and asks you to add a comment and then to report the crash:
When you restart Camino, you can visit about:crashes to find the report ID for the crash you just experienced and even see the processed report.
The about:crashes page contains a list of report IDs for crash reports you’ve submitted successfully to Mozilla’s crash collection servers. If you click on the report ID, you can see the processed report for your crash. Not all reports are processed immediately, so you may see a “processing” screen at first:
Once processing is complete, you can see the full report for your incident on crash-stats:
How you can improve the chances of your crash being fixed (and how to improve your crash report)
We hope that you’ll never have to use the new crash reporting in Camino 2, but if you do, following these simple steps will make your report as useful as possible and improve the chances of the crash you experienced getting fixed.
When you experience a crash, the most important thing you can do is to allow the Camino Crash Reporter to submit your report to us. If we don’t know a crash is happening, there is a zero percent chance that we will be able to fix it (if you’re happy seeing the same crash over and over, then don’t feel the need to submit a crash report 
). Many times we’re able to discover and fix crashes just from the aggregate data generated from users submitting crash reports to us.
Second, when you submit your report, please add a comment! We know that crashing is frustrating and disrupting, and it is tempting to just press Submit (or even Cancel) and get back to what you were doing. However, while the computer-generated data that is submitted in the crash report tells us “what” is happening, it often is insufficient to allow us to fix the problem, and comments can help bridge that gap. When you add a comment, please be reasonably descriptive when telling us what actions you might have performed just before Camino crashed. As you can see in the sample crash above, I listed a number of specific steps that I performed just before Camino crashed.
In addition to providing a comment, if you are comfortable providing the URL you were viewing when Camino crashed (and you know, or can look up in History, what that URL was), include it in your comment, too. While Camino attempts to collect the URL you were on when Camino crashed, the URL is not displayed with your crash report for privacy reasons and is not readily available to anyone. As I mentioned several years ago, a good comment and a URL can be the difference between a frustrating crash and a fix. Unfortunately, only a few reports out of every hundred currently include a comment, so there are many opportunities to understand and fix crashes that are currently being lost.
Finally, if you experience what you think might be the same crash, over and over—either whenever you visit a certain site you crash, or performing the same series of actions on a variety of sites leads to a crash—please file a bug. While aggregate crash data can help us discover crashes, especially those that don’t otherwise seem to have a pattern, this data is no substitute for a bug report from someone who is actually seeing the crash frequently. Sometimes specific crashes can still get lost in aggregate data, and filing a bug report on a crash that’s plaguing you can bring it to our attention.
When you file your bug report, please be sure to include the report IDs of incidents of this crash. To get the report ID, type about:crashes in Camino’s location bar and press Return. Camino will display a list of crash reports you have submitted and their corresponding report IDs (a long string of letters and numbers). Copy the crash report ID corresponding to the crash you are reporting and paste the ID into your bug report, adding bp- to the beginning of the pasted string. For example, a crash report id of 0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 should become bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 in your bug report, and Bugzilla will then link that string to your crash report. (Please do not paste entire crash reports into the “Comments” field of the bug report.) Then, please be willing to answer questions and perform some tests as we work to understand and fix the crash you’ve reported in the bug.
Finally, when filing a bug or making a comment in a crash report, please don’t berate us. We know you’re upset that Camino crashed on you, and we’re just as upset, but yelling at us doesn’t help. Also, since at least one-third of crashes we see are caused by third-party software (for example, browser plug-ins, third-party hacks, or even fragile parts of Mac OS X itself), you might be yelling at the wrong party anyway.
In summary:
- Any crash report you submit is better than no report at all, so please always allow Camino Crash Reporter to do its job.
- The more information you provide in your crash report (comment or URL), the more useful your report is to the developers.
- For crashes you can reproduce or see over and over, reports filed with Camino Crash Reporter are no substitute for an actual bug report (with crash report IDs).
- Please be polite and civil in your comments and bug reports; we’re all working towards the same goal here (Camino not crashing on you).
All of which is a long way of saying “you could be the key to fixing the crash that is annoying you.”
Please enjoy Camino 2 (due out “real soon now”), and don’t fear the Camino Crash Reporter; it’s only trying to help.
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