Alpha 2 Roundup

A lot has happened since Alpha 1. Tracemonkey, the Just-In-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler, has been enabled for content (as opposed to chrome) by default. The old Find As You Type backend has been removed and replaced by Toolkit's. Audio/Video support has been enhanced. SeaMonkey has switched to the new mozilla-1.9.1 branch (which will lead to Firefox 3.1) together with the rest of comm-central.

The new Alpha is not only about changes under the hood, though. Most notably Alpha 2 now features the first step towards customizable toolbars: you can now select the icon size and whether to display icons and/or text in both the browser and the MailNews component:



Also new is RSS feed support for MailNews which has been ported from Thunderbird:


Since there is no support for displaying RSS feeds in the browser yet the feed icon at the right end of the URL bar has been modified to allow subscribing to the feed in the MailNews component for the time being.

There are of course things that are not working yet. For one Get All New Messages is not working correctly (fails for POP3 accounts, Bug 259212). This will probably be fixed soon and then maybe even allow to query RSS accounts, too. Also noteworthy is my all-time favorite Bug 338549 which has the effect of presenting multiple password prompts at once when checking multiple MailNews accounts. And when you look at the Bookmarks menu you might find that bookmark groups are not appearing there (Bug 461167).

Trunk development continued after the cut for Alpha 2 had been made. Current nightlies already feature several improvements, particularly the new Places-based history UI (including the frecency-powered URL bar). A follow-up post will cover the details.

Progress

• Treelines: now fixed (last checkin: certificate details tree) (Bug 438793)
• border-radius support (CSS3): style system changes (Bug 450652)
• @font-face support: implement user font set object (Bug 441473)
• Places-based history UI: port Firefox utilityOverlay.js API to SeaMonkey (prerequisite) (Bug 370698)
• Toolbar customization: spring.png for Modern theme, small icons (Navigator, MailNews) for Classic theme (Bug 428227), use transparent background for small Classic theme messenger icons (Bug 462645), add alpha transparency to small Classic communicator and navigator icons (Bug 464936) and finally: allow to set icon size and whether/where to display text per toolbar (Bug 428216, also fixes Bug 253007: allow to set Modern theme Navigator buttons (Back etc.) to show text and icons)
• use Toolkit download manager backend: disable Toolkit's download manager UI for the suite (Bug 381157)
• Feed integration: connect feed discovery with MailNews feed subscribe (interim solution until Feed Preview is implemented) (Bug 465258)
• make sure Group By Sort in saved search (virtual folder) doesn't crash on expand/collapse group (bug 467840 isl pending) (Bug 465011)
• open only one window when opening a local html file (pending: fix internet shortcuts) (Bug 461501)

MailNews

• use hourglass with pointer for mouse cursor when loading new newsgroup (Bug 178767)
• fix problems filtering POP3 mail when hidden pref to remove dupes is set (Bug 457168)
• use application name in the cancel message body for News (Bug 294824)
• move keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V from "Paste As Quotation" to "Paste Without Formatting" (Bug 192330)
• set default retention policy of "delete all but the last X messages" to 2000 (was: 30) and change field types to "number" (Bug 438918)
• correct filtering custom mail headers (Sender/Date/Status) (Bug 404489)
• eliminate "[JavaScript Application]" dialog titles (use prompt service instead of window.alert() in chrome code) (Bug 432608)
• always convert Content Type to lowercase for matching (Bug 381659)
• make sure the number in the "Order Received" column does not become negative when mail's offset in local mail folder file exceeds 2GB (Bug 450991)
• rename "Move" on "Message" menu to "Move To" to match context menu (Bug 185940)
• do not do a disk sync after each POP3 header in partial header download fetch (Bug 385838)
• remove own address from Mail-Followup-To: on reply (Bug 325429)
• import Sent/Outbox from Eudora (Bug 452296)
• do not insert extra LF characters when saving IMAP messages with CRLF line ending at a multiple of 8192 bytes (Bug 460636)
• apply changes to read state of IMAP messages when toggling it in a cross-folder saved search (Bug 461584)
• unlock destination file after saving message (.eml) (Bug 461256)
• Rebuild Summary File: save message metadata (junk-related, tags, etc.) when reindexing local or IMAP folders (Bug 449768)
• enable threaded/grouped-by-sort views for saved searches across multiple folders (Bug 379806)
• add a shortcut for Rewrap (Bug 461667)
• do not require to send a mail in order to enable MDN (return receipt) subject encoding (Bug 462725)
• fix importing Outlook 2007 account settings (check whether Organization is empty) (Bug 450854)
• fix importing mail from Outlook 2003/2007 (Bug 408323)
• fix setting port when importing account settings from Outlook Express (Bug 262641)
• add a bit of jitter to the biff-interval (+/-5%, 1-30 seconds, mail.biff.add_interval_jitter) (Bug 235086)
• add support for setting Mail-Followup-To and Mail-Reply-To headers (aids using mailing lists; see comments 0 and 27 for details and prefs) (Bug 204339)
• port Thunderbird RSS/Atom reader to SeaMonkey (Bug 255834)
• allow extensions to add custom filter actions (Bug 419356)
• make filters using Sender as custom mail header work (do not match From instead) (Bug 404489)
• use generic "Confirm" instead of the message in "advance to next unread" dialog title (Bug 84828)
• make sure to actually import messages when importing from Outlook Express (Bug 455229)
• do not corrupt attributes of tags (such as IMG) when re-editing (Edit Draft, Forward Inline, Edit As New) quoted-printable HTML messages (Bug 307023)
• do not crash on IMAP folder with sequence Delete, Rebuild Index, Undo (Bug 457751)
• do not auto-sync IMAP folders that require a password if the password has not been provided yet (Bug 456291)
• mark message as read when deleting it from local folder (or POP/IMAP when offline) (Bug 463849)
• do not crash when doing a body search (Bug 465805)
• close msf files after compacting folders (do not limit number of folders that can be opened) (Bug 249754)
• change IMAP APPEND wait timeout from 100 to 20 sec (improve copying mail to Sent folder) (Bug 396874)
• do not request IMAP capability command if server announces it in greetings (Bug 401293)
• do not compact the offline store when issuing Compact Folder on IMAP folder (just issue an IMAP EXPUNGE instead) (Bug 420115)
• remove accounts without a server or a duplicate server upon loading accounts (Bug 464808)
• advance to next message when deleting message while offline and using IMAP mark-as-deleted model (Bug 451877)
• generalize Bayes code to support multiple traits (one of which is Junk) (Bug 453885)
• integrate generalized Bayes traits into MailNews classifications (enable extensions to define custom traits) (Bug 461479)
• update unread count for threaded cross-folder views after reading a matching message (Bug 466241)
• clear only a server's own biff state on Windows (fix new mail popup window) (Bug 462762)
• improve references parser logic for In-Reply-To/References headers (e.g. with mixed message-id and non-message-id content) (Bug 466796)
• fetch IMAP flags only once (Bug 466891)
• display website in feed message headers (Bug 463255)
• place focus in Subject field instead of body when composing HTML mail with pre-filled recipient (e.g. mailto:) (Bug 467244)
• keep showing current message list view after rebuilding another mailbox's index using File/Properties (Bug 467246)
• do not crash when parsing IMAP message headers (Bug 467114)

Address Book

• change layout of Card dialog to better cope with lower screen resolutions (Bug 63941)
• do not collect addresses into Collected Addressed that occur in other ABs (Bug 58769)
• actually apply changes to Outlook (Express) cards (Bug 459956)
• remove contact from search results display when it has been deleted (Bug 435027)
• immediately reflect that a list has been deleted (Bug 462364)
• do not crash when selecting recipient from contacts sidebar (Bug 463560)

Audio/Video

• stop video download when document has been closed/unloaded (Bug 451457)
• support direct loading and displaying of Ogg files (Bug 448603)
• download video/audio resources to the cache during playback (Bug 462378)
• add context menu for video (Bug 461136)
• support WAV format in
• support 8-bit WAV samples (Bug 463929)
• support duration for video (Bug 449307)
• provide audio and video interfaces even when media is diabled, so that content popup menu construction works (Bug 466234)

CSS

• remove support for -moz-pre-wrap (Bug 433065)

Locales

• add si (Sinhala) to source locales (Bug 458519)
• add ka (Georgian) to source locales (Bug 463917)
• add pt-PT (European Portuguese) to source locales (Bug 453472)

DNS

• implement negative (NXDOMAIN) DNS cache (cache a failed hostlookup for 1 minute) (Bug 208312)
• bypass internal DNS cache when doing manual page reload (Bug 459724)
• add DNS pre-fetching (see comment 8) (Bug 453403)

Mac

• update navigator.onLine when network connectivity changes on Mac (online/offline detection) (Bug 426932)
• allow to update / set disabled attribute on native submenus on Mac OS X (Bug 456374)
• turn off shadow for autoscroll icon in Modern (on Mac OS X) (Bug 461367)
• rewrite Mac OS X default plugin for 64-bit (Bug 428973)
• support formatted text (e.g. HTML) from clipboard and drag-and-drop on Mac OS X (Bug 428096)
• fix Mac OS 10.4-only top crash (Bug 458961)
• make Dock icon show new mail at the same time as the Growl alert (Bug 459482)
• add Growl integration for mail alerts on Mac OS X (Bug 308552)
• ensure that clicking a Growl alert brings SeaMonkey to the front (Bug 459485)
• make Growl alerts of New Mail notify for the account for which new mail has just been received (Bug 459483)

GTK/Linux

• do not corrupt XUL FastLoad cache when application is running while upgrading on Linux (Bug 368428)
• add a globally shared location for plugins (/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins) on Linux/Unix (Bug 440506)
• make filepicker filters case insensitive (Bug 136941)

Add-ons & AUS

• skip "Continue" (and close dialog after two seconds) if all updates have been successful during add-ons update (Bug 397493)
• AUS update dialog rework / do not list extensions with available updates for the next version of the app in app update "extension will be disabled" warning (Bug 324121)
• do not install automatic update if installed version is newer (Bug 313057)
• display update wizard Back button on Linux only when needed (Bug 464765)
• display placeholder for disabled/blocked plugins (Bug 391728)
• add new icons for disabled/blocked plugin placeholders (Bug 462965)
• enable Install button in Add-on Manager by default (Bug 414014)

Debug & QA

• hide bloat items from Debug menu unless they work (i.e. if the application has been built with --enable-logrefcnt) (Bug 93902)
• remove obsolete 'Form Manager Samples' item from Debug menu (Bug 462085)
• move Debug & QA menus to the left of the Help menu (Bug 418246)

Certificates

• store certificates for temporary SSL server exceptions only temporarily (Bug 460829)
• implement new security exception handling backend for MailNews (Bug 429843)
• use new security exceptions front end (Bug 465978)
• introduce new certificate error page which better separates user information from technical details (Bug 463504)

Compiling

• remove MOZ_CO_PROJECT (Bug 451825)
• remove --enable-glitz (Bug 445321)
• allow to pass arbitrary options to hg using client.py (--hg-options) (Bug 458215)
• remove support for --enable-extensions=all (Bug 450015)
• increase required Pango build-time version to 1.14 (Bug 460717)
• create a makefile target (source-package) for packaging a source tarball (Bug 456373)
• allow to build SeaMonkey with --enable-static (fixed by removal of Find As You Type) (Bug 397146)
• make --disable-wave work (Bug 463537)
• make client.py update the default repository from mozilla-central to mozilla-1.9.1 (Bug 465521)

General

• enable Set As Wallpaper context menu entry based on presence of shell service (was: Windows only) (Bug 454017)
• remove remaining contents.rdf (stop using installed-chrome.txt) (Bug 366673)
• limit Gecko date in User Agent string to 8 digits (YYYYMMDD) (Bug 450973)
• improve handling of DOS and Unix style FTP listings (whitespace at end of filename, dates and symlinks) (Bug 365133)
• speculatively load referenced JavaScript files, blocking "real" parsing on a script src load (Bug 364315)
• implement cross-site XMLHttpRequest (Bug 389508)
• make multiple text selection (with Ctrl) work with double-click "word-by-word" and triple-click "paragraph" modes (Bug 415707)
• add support for retrieving PNG (lossless) images from Windows clipboard (Bug 444800)
• correct button states (hover vs. normal) of Classic theme stop button (Bug 431452)
• put the search box in the main toolbar of Bookmark Manager (Bug 460756)
• implement geolocation prompt (notification bar) (Bug 459413)
• make sure Spell Checker always identifies misspelled words (Bug 432225)
• correct Sidebar "Tabs" menu placement (Bug 388349)
• enable view-source link-browsing (SRC, HREF) (Bug 17612)
• optimize PNGs in the Classic theme (Bug 464663)
• add CF_HDROP support back into Windows drag and drop data object (re-enable dragging images to applications like Photoshop) (Bug 440911)
• remove old Find As You Type (FAYT) (Bug 461938)
• use Toolkit Type Ahead Find instead of the old one (Bug 345526)
• make clicking on an autocompleted input field not break autocomplete (Bug 460466)
• respect Accept-Ranges response header (only accept value "bytes" for resume support) (Bug 462707)
• add accesskeys to print dialogs (Bug 277296)
• add view-source link-browsing (Bug 464352)
• Vista integration: avoid the second UAC prompt for helper.exe on software update by launching it directly from the elevated updater.exe process (Bug 390344), move installer parts requiring elevated rights to new helper.exe (improve installation as a standard user) (Bug 453797)
• bind default toolbar appearance to Preferences/Appearance settings (Bug 465089)
• support use of access control headers to allow cross-site downloadable fonts (Bug 457825)