01.24.11

Why Wevah Is Awesome

Posted in Camino, Life at 3:35 pm by

(Or at least one reason why.)

Wevah stopped by #camino on Sunday to help Sam fix a server migration-related website bug we’d just discovered. Before the day was out, not only had Wevah fixed that site bug (Regex Jesus to the rescue!), but a second one as well.

Even better, he fixed a three-plus-year-old “blocker” Colloquy bug 10 minutes after I mentioned the bug to him (it’s almost as if he scares bugs into fixing themselves).

The best part of it all is that Wevah’s awesomeness rubs off on everyone around him; after Wevah finished his bug-fixing spree, I looked again at a bug that had been stumping me for some time (Wevah had actually given me the hint that allowed me to fix said bug’s predecessor) and was then able to re-arrange some code and get things working.

Fixing bugs is never more fun than when Wevah is around; everyone should be so lucky to work with Wevah on a project sometime.

And that, my friends, is why Wevah is awesome!

01.12.11

Camino 2011 Week 1

Posted in Camino at 9:36 pm by

As I mentioned previously, I don’t plan to try to continue regular weekly updates this year (though Sam plans to begin once again producing regular updates, in the old Camino Update style, it seems). However, I do plan to post irregular updates as warranted, and although this post is titled in the old style, it is firmly in the new “irregular updates as warranted” camp.

Camino started 2011 off with a bang, as Stuart Morgan landed both of his large, long-awaited patches: the history loading rewrite and the autocomplete performance rewrite (the latter begun originally by Dan Weber). As a result, typing in the location bar is now smooth as silk once again, and the autocomplete results are a lot more awesome. If the poor typing performance in the location bar has kept you away from nightly builds, you can make the jump now without fear (as always when switching to nightlies, be sure to make a backup of your profile first). Stuart also debugged, fixed, and landed his patch for a focus bug that prevented form fields on some pages (such as Google web applications) from being focused, and he dusted off another old Dan Weber patch to partition off the feed and security icons at the far end of the location bar.

Returning after the holidays, I landed Chris Peterson’s patch to finally make the Downloads window use the proper selection color. In addition, I started work on what appeared at first to be a simple follow-up to that patch, a fix to make the selection color behave properly when the Downloads window was in the background. (Alas, it did not end up being simple at all, but with some help from Ilya Sherman and Stuart, I completed my first major code refactoring, and I was able to land the patch late last night.) I also pushed a few website changes and started working on the release-wrangling tasks leading up to Camino 2.1 Alpha 1.

Chris Lawson initiated our first major CLOSEME sweep of old unconfirmed bugs of the year, setting us up to close many abandoned bugs next weekend for a good start to the year.

In addition, we’ve been very happy to meet a few Camino users who are interested in helping with development and triage (perhaps it was a popular New Year’s resolution in the Camino community? ;) ). Regardless of the reason, as an all-volunteer project often limited by the human resources available to us, we’re always grateful for every contributor. If you’re interested in getting involved with Camino development or bug triage, feel free to stop by our IRC channel, let us know what your skills are, and find out how you can help. (Similarly, if you speak a language other than English and want to help with the localization of Camino, please visit the Camino Localization project’s website and subscribe to their mailing list to learn how you can help.)

And that’s it for the first week of 2011. I’m off to continue working on release-wrangling for Camino 2.1 Alpha 1, which we hope to have available soon. In the meantime, enjoy the improved autocomplete performance in the nightlies, and let us know if you find any lingering issues!

01.09.11

Camino 2010 in Review

Posted in Camino, Life at 3:49 am by

For me, 2010 was an exhausting year, and that definitely bled through into my Camino involvement; I had less time to write, so there were fewer and more irregular status updates—and, while Camino Planet was malfunctioning, none at all—fewer forum posts, fewer bug cleanups, and generally less of a public face. As a result of the year, I ended up taking a fairly long hiatus for the holidays, and I’m trying not to jump back into things at full speed.

For Camino, 2010 was an interesting year, a year of many transitions. We had more changes in our teams than in past years, as Sam headed off to travel the world (and most of his responsibilities fell to others) and as successful careers took off for other contributors. Although 2010 was the first year since I began these years-in-review that we did not ship a major new version, we made many significant changes in the hectic first half of the year that laid the foundation for bigger and better things to come.

  1. We shipped five security and stability updates to Camino 2 during the year, including fixing several long-standing bugs; our localization teams continued to supply release notes and update descriptions for these updates in all 15 languages. We also released Camino 1.6.11, one final security and stability update for our Mac OS X 10.3.9 users.
  2. Camino 2 was a finalist for Best Independent Browser and Best Mac Browser in the 2010 About.com Reader’s Choice Awards (in the former category, Camino was the only browser nominated that didn’t run on Windows, and we finished second in the voting).
  3. Camino built across six different branches in the course of the year, from Gecko 1.8.1 (Camino 1.6.x) all the way to the latest, Gecko 1.9.3.
  4. Christopher also wrote a very significant patch that moved Camino from the old, creaky Mork history to the newer SQLite-based history backend; combined with 2009’s autocomplete rewrite and the move to Gecko 1.9.2, Camino finally became free of the trinity of Bad Old Mozilla Technologies (Mork, RDF, and XPFE).
  5. Camino development moved from CVS to Mercurial, and our volunteer development team adapted to the many changes brought by the new system. (Stuart learned his 1001st different version control system in service of Camino, and I learned about the wretched, buggy state of Mercurial’s CVS import tools, spending the better part of a month trying to coax a workable import out of that software.) In addition, I put together build automation for our new Gecko 1.9.2-based repository and nightlies.
  6. After getting nightlies based on Gecko 1.9.2, most of our attention during the year was on the lingering issues with the new (slower) history and autocomplete implementations, and to a lesser extent on focus regressions from the Gecko focus rewrite. This was an area where the strains and limitations of an all-volunteer project became evident in 2010, as many of us spent about half the year living with a slow location bar. Dan Weber started working on fixes early in the year, but he was pulled away by school and other things; Stuart picked up the work and, as time permitted, slowly iterated through what became a significant rewrite of both the autocomplete code and parts of the history user interface code. (The thoroughly-rewritten code, which landed in the first week of 2011, works very well, and everyone will see it in an alpha very soon.)
  7. Our “fun with tinderboxen” in 2010 was not nearly as traumatic as in past years. Although both of our 10.4 tinderboxen—our original Xserve, cb-xserve01, and our last PowerPC tinderbox, cb-minibinus01—went down for a several weeks during the year, both were resurrected successfully (although cb-minibinus01 came back running Mac OS X 10.5, which was not ideal, but better than losing our last PPC box entirely). In addition, at the beginning of the year, we brought a brand-new Xserve, cb-xserve04, online, which gives us some headroom for the future (in addition to producing our Camino 2.1 development nightly builds). While Sam did most of the work of setting up cb-xserve04, I handled the setup of the other two when they returned to us, leaving me fully versed in tinderbox setup.
  8. While Camino websites have been trouble-free for quite some time, Camino Planet did suffer an outage where it failed to update due to errors after a bizarre SSH outage on our server. Our major website project in the second half of the year involved moving to a newer, better-configured server (as our host was decommissioning our current one); Sam did most of the work on that project, and afterwards we were able to deploy a number of website changes that we had wanted to be able to do for some time. The other significant event in the website department was the introduction of Flash version checking (a joint effort from Stuart, Philippe, Sam, and me) on the welcome page shown after installing or upgrading Camino; the notifications have made a noticeable difference in ensuring Camino users are updating Flash to get that plug-in’s latest security and stability fixes.
  9. The composition of our development team was in flux again this year, reflecting the nature of a volunteer project. Many of those who carried Camino through 2009 and the Camino 2 release moved on to new jobs or lucrative careers as indie Mac/iOS developers, while others had to cut back commitments. In addition to Christopher’s and Stuart’s efforts mentioned above, highlights of our developer cadre included the following:
    • Towards the end of 2010, Chris Peterson showed up and began fixing assorted bugs, mostly in the Downloads window and in our menu code (though he has additional patches in flight touching scarier stuff, like focus!).
    • Sean Murphy (who contributed significant features to Camino 2) made a brief reappearance to update our gesture support for Gecko changes, and Ilya Sherman performed his first code reviews. Philippe Wittenbergh continued to keep us looking good with website fixes, new icons and images, updated CSS, and he even ventured into the realm of small code and Makefile fixes.
    • Although Sam insisted that I be listed on the Programming team beginning with the Camino 1.6 release, I had never really felt like a “developer” previously (in addition to ad-blocking, I mostly touched project file changes and, after some tutelage by mento, various build system-related fixes). However, in 2010 I finally started producing fixes to our Cocoa/Objective-C code on a somewhat-regular basis; I learned a little more about debugging and began investigating and, where I could, fixing things that annoyed me! I also ended up fixing several bugs in Gecko that blocked our 1.9.2-based builds or were regressions, and I worked on extending a number of changeset-related Gecko build system features to work in cases where an application is built using code from multiple repositories (as is true for every Gecko-using application other than Firefox). So, in 2010 I learned (and forgot!) a good bit of Objective-C/Cocoa (and some Perl), and I finally felt like I could play a developer on TV. While I’ll never be able to have a large impact like writing new features or performing significant code surgery and refactoring as our Cocoa stalwarts do, I can still help by fixing some small things, in between my other responsibilities in build and release, website and documentation, and bug-minding. As we often say, every additional developer counts. ;)

So there’s a belated look at the many highlights (and some “lowlights”) of Camino in 2010. Although sometimes it seems like less happened in 2010 than in years past, looking back on the year reveals many large changes; they were just sometimes slow to develop and often were not exciting, user-facing changes. Nevertheless, we find ourselves on the cusp of a great new Camino 2.1 Alpha as the new year opens!

Finally, I want to take a moment to extend thanks again to the entire Camino community: our developers, our testers, our localizers, our users—the folks posting in the forum, writing AppleScripts, and filing bugs; those who take time to blog, tweet, and make videos about Camino; and especially those who help out with user support and bug triage—and our friends. All of you make this great little browser possible, and we’re grateful for your contributions, your continued support, and your love for Camino. Here’s to a great 2011!

01.03.11

Camino Planet feed changing and other administrative notices

Posted in Camino at 10:09 pm by

Just as a brief administrative update, following this post, Camino Planet will switch to pulling the feed that corresponds to my Software category, which includes additional topics such as open-source and other software issues and more general computing-related items. This harmonizes the feed at Camino Planet with what Planet Mozilla already consumes, as well as with the overall feel of Camino Planet.

In addition, I’ve talked with Sam about either sharing or having him take over the Camino update “responsibilities” this year, in order to provide more timely updates than I’ve been able to produce recently. ;) (Edit: Look, he’s already posted the first one!)

Finally, my annual Camino Year-in-Review post is still coming (if only people would stop interrupting me!), so there is still that to look forward to before I possibly go radio-silent for a while. ;)

12.30.10

Reminder: Year 2011 Bug Contest

Posted in Camino, History at 12:12 am by

This is a late (but not quite as late as last year!) reminder of the “pool” for the 2011 installment of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing contest (the first 2011 Gecko browsers will be available in about 54 hours from now).

Since perennial contender Yahoo! finally cleaned up its act last year, the 2010 dodo prize went to FCKEditor, the first winner that affected entire swaths of the web rather than just a single website or a collection of an organization’s websites. (FCKEditor is a WYSIWYG text editor implementation for web pages used by many websites and by common web applications/web-based software packages for creating and maintaining websites.)

However, I’m hopeful that, after so many years, this entire contest will soon go the way of the dodo. Between renewed efforts to remove the build date from the Gecko user-agent string, evangelism associated with the many user-agent string changes in Gecko 2.0, and simple exhaustion of the number of possible contenders (after six years, and with the tens place in the year having been filled with a new number last year for the first time since many websites were created), I’m (overly) optimistic that people’s regexps have finally been audited. :P

Still, get your picks in now for both the site/company/piece of the “web software stack” that will break and the reporter of the Tech Evangelism bug who notices said site/company/piece of web software. No actual prizes will be awarded, but both winners will be recognized in a future entry in this journal.

And remember: only you can prevent bad browser-sniffing! :P

12.16.10

Camino Tips: Going Flash-Free (and Cheating using Google Chrome)

Posted in Camino, Links at 1:23 am by

(Hey, look at that; Camino Planet is working normally again, which means my posts are appearing again.)

Once again it’s been over a year since the last post in the Camino Tips series, but we’re back with another one.

Recently, going “Flash-free” (and cheating by using Google Chrome when you hit a Flash-only website) has become all the rage on the web; you can do so in Camino, too, with a little help from AppleScript and/or Automator.

Short version:

  1. Uninstall the Flash Player plug-in by moving Flash Player.plugin and flashplayer.xpt from /Library/Internet Plug-ins to some other location.
  2. Install one of the solutions below to facilitate opening the current page in Google Chrome (which ships with its own built-in copy of the Flash plug-in).

Toolbar Script solution

Carlo Gandolfi (aka gand, of FreeSMUG and Portable Camino fame) wrote a short AppleScript that can be used as a toolbar script; if you’re on a page with Flash that you need to be able to view, you can click the toolbar button to open the page in Google Chrome.

For more information about this method and to download the toolbar AppleScript, see Going Flash-Free with Camino on FreeSMUG.

Automator-based Service solution

Philippe Wittenbergh, always mindful of the keyboard accessibility of features and tricks, adapted the toolbar script solution into an Automator-based Service for Mac OS X 10.6 (it can probably be adapted for use with ThisService for users on Mac OS X 10.5); if you’re on a page with Flash that you need to be able to view, you can use the keyboard shortcut you’ve assigned to the Service to open the page in Google Chrome.

For more information about this method and to download the Automator workflow, see Workflow for a nearly Flash-less online life with Camino at ::[Empty Spaces]::.

—

Thanks to Carlo and Philippe for putting these tools and their instructions together (it’s something I had wanted to do for quite a while now, but, as usual of late, never found the time to do)!

11.01.10

Resurrecting Camino Planet

Posted in Camino at 2:02 am by

Some of you may have noticed the lack of updates on Camino Planet for the past month and change. In late September, the site stopped updating automatically, and in the process of investigating why it wasn’t updating, it broke entirely.

Over the last week, we’ve repaired most of the breakage (except for the site theme), and it’s now possible to make the site update again, albeit not yet automatically. In order to keep Camino-related posts flowing on Camino Planet, I’ll trigger manual updates as necessary. In particular, I hope to post an update later this week about everything we’ve been doing since the last “regular” update.

Hopefully we’ll have Camino Planet back to normal in the next couple of weeks, but until then, know that it will continue to update, if on a somewhat irregular schedule.

09.26.10

If not me…

Posted in Camino, Life at 10:40 pm by

Working as part of an all-volunteer team on a web browser that competes with multiple corporate-funded and -developed browsers can at times be frustrating. Competitors employ dozens (or more) developers to work full-time on their browsers, and they usually have funding to hire more developers when needed (or, at worst case, the ability to reassign someone from another team or product in a pinch). They have marketing budgets, the ear of the press, and the ability to use overtime to get things done.

In contrast, an all-volunteer project by definition relies on the donations of limited free time from interested individuals—free time that could otherwise be used to go to the movies, study for exams, spend time with friends or family, or ride one’s horse through the wilderness. No one can tell a volunteer developer “you have two days to finish this feature” or “you’re going to drop everything else until this bug is fixed” or any of the myriad of managerial commands available to corporate browser developers. Sometimes you can’t fix that bug because real life intervenes, and you and your fellow volunteers can’t implement that great feature idea for a lack of hours in the day (or other similar manpower constraint). Sometimes working on an all-volunteer browser is like going into a fight with both hands and one leg tied behind your back, and that’s often disheartening.

Recently, this thought from Kevin Hoctor (via Michael Tsai) really resonated with me:

What struck me recently and inspired me to keep on the path was a simple question: if not you, then who? Are there any software products out today that I would use instead of my own? No, there are not. And why not? Why do I still like my finance software better than anything else?

In the face of all of those obstacles and limitations, why do I continue to spend my free time helping to build a web browser? Fundamentally, it’s as Hoctor says; Camino is the browser I want to use. I’ve used most of the other Mac browsers out there, and I don’t really like them; some are plagued by a quest for the kitchen sink, some have been hit hard by the “ugly stick,” and some change all the time to match the latest internet fads or whims from above. None match my browsing needs and wants as well as Camino. Sure, some might have feature x that I’d like that Camino doesn’t yet have, but they also have drawbacks that Camino doesn’t, and the overall experience always tilts in favor of Camino. And if I’m not working to create this browsing experience, then who will? Sure, it’s frustrating (and even soul-crushing) at times, but this is a browser, a browsing experience, a trusted tool, that I love.

There are, of course, other reasons why I work on Camino: the great people on our team who’ve become friends over the years, our loyal users and our supportive community, and the desire to ensure a quality alternative browser to the corporate-developed products. But it begins and ends with that same thought expressed by Kevin Hoctor: if I don’t (help) build it, who will?

08.15.10

Camino 2010 Late July-Early August Roundup

Posted in Camino at 1:09 am by

Although it’s been only a little over a month since the last update, it feels like I’ve been heads-down in code and bugs for much longer than that.

In the past month, Stuart Morgan has continued working on the performance issues with the new autocomplete. He also removed some old code in our Keychain implementation and added safety checks to prevent some crazy behavior in situations where there is no document present. Stuart also adapted our work-around for Flash 10 crashing after Exposé to handle the same problem in Flash 10.1; this fix is forthcoming in Camino 2.0.4. In addition, he added null-checks to problematic Gecko macros in our Places integration code, handled a good chunk of the superreview requests, and committed the 10 crash reporter localizations that our localization teams contributed to the Google Breakpad project.

Sean Murphy (of Safe Browsing, tab dragging, and keyboard loop fame) reappeared with a partial patch to get gestures working again in the content area. Stuart sent the patch back for some additional changes, so we’re waiting on Sean to have some time to address the review comments.

I feel like I’ve been attacking things all over the place since the last update. I spent several weeks working on getting Gecko security fixes tested and landed for Camino 2.0.4. I reviewed a couple of Stuart’s patches to our update script, and then Stuart and I deployed a “scary update warning” to users on Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 who were still using Camino 1.6.x. I also continued working on a fix to stop overzealous unescaping of certain Unicode characters in our location bar, finally ending up, with Stuart’s help, with a version that made both 10.4 and 10.5-and-up happy. I landed a few minor code cleanup fixes and also helped Stuart debug a Keychain issue I had observed and the Flash 10.1 crash. Recently, I began working on replacing the jargon-filled (and non-localizable) certificate error pages with more user-friendly and informative ones, using the framework Sean had created when he implemented our Safe Browsing support (Philippe Wittenbergh is working on the CSS for the new page). Finally, I landed the remaining Camino fixes for 2.0.4 and got the release notes ready for localization.

So, here we stand at mid-August. We’re looking to release Camino 2.0.4 very soon, and, hopefully, Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 not too long after that. Until then, enjoy the remainder of the summer!

07.12.10

Camino 2010 June-Early July Roundup

Posted in Camino at 4:49 pm by

As I alluded to last month, I’ve been in a bit of a posting malaise for some time, so it has been a while since the last Camino update (let alone the last regular Camino update) here.

At the time of our last “regular” update, we were very close to shipping nightlies off of Gecko 1.9.2 and also releasing the Camino 2.0.3 security and stability update. Both of those have since happened.

Since then, we’ve been hard at work on driving the bugs blocking Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 to zarro and readying the release of Camino 2.0.4, another security and stability update. Stuart Morgan updated our Sparkle pull, went on a tear cleaning up deprecated function usage, and started attacking thorny 2.1 bugs, Gecko regressions, and revivified Flash crashes that we’d previously worked around. As a result, we’re sitting at only one blocker for 2.1a1: some continuing performance issues with the new autocomplete. In addition, Stuart pretty much single-handedly got Camino building off of mozilla-central, before we were slammed into a brick wall of embedding-unfriendly code and massive Gecko platform changes landing after the platform had reached the beta stage!

I’ve been working on fixing assorted small bugs here and there, including some changes to our AppleScript dictionary and a long-standing bug with selections in the Save dialogues (thanks to a tip from Wevah). I’ve also worked on shepherding patches into the tree—both for 2.0.4 and Gecko fixes we needed for 2.1—and have done some debugging of other bugs, old and new. In addition, I coordinated the upstreaming of Camino’s crash reporter client localizations back to the Google Breakpad project and reviewed several of Stuart’s build- and update-related patches.

So that’s more or less where we stand in mid-July. We’ll hopefully have 2.0.4 out by the end of the month, and 2.1a1 not too long after that (free time permitting). As always, if you’re interested in helping out, come find us on irc.