Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

Back in October things were looking very gloomy for Thunderbird. It was a bit of a double-whammy when Scott McGregor, Thunderbird lead engineer and David Bienvenu, developer announced they were leaving Mozilla. These announcements came about a month after, then CEO Mitchel Baker announced the split-off to Thunderbird Mail Corporation (MailCo, now known as Mozilla Messaging). Finally, some good news to report about Thunderbird.

In his blog entry, Progress Update, David Ascher has announced Mark Banner (Standard8 on IRC) has signed on as a full-time on Thunderbird (effective next month).

One of the projects that Mark will finally have time to push on is to beef up the test automation framework and help drive better test coverage for the codebase, which is a crucial step to allow the refactoring we want to do, and facilitate a more agile development model.

Further, Rick Tessner has joined as a part-time build engineer. Rick will be helping with helping with build automation and release automation.

I stumbled upon a link to the In-progress Releases page on the MozillaWiki via David Ascher. Over the next 30 days expect to see new releases for Fx 2, Fx 3 and Thunderbird 2:

• Firefox 2.0.0.13 is scheduled for release on or around March 25th. This has already been confirmed in the last Weekly Update meeting on March 10th. I also noticed this past Friday my Fx 2 nightly builds had been bumped up to Fx 2.0.0.14pre. Fx 2.0.0.13 should be released to the Beta Channel later this week.
• Firefox 3.0b5 is scheduled for release on or around March 27th. Um…okay, I sure wasn’t expecting to see this coming out so soon. It was a little over 10-days ago when Firefox 3 Beta 5 Announced. Now, I wonder is Beta 5 going to be the last of the Beta releases? Kinda moving fast on this release. Because of this news, I am going to hold off on Making the Switch to Fx 3.0 as my primary browser.
• Thunderbird 2.0.0.13 will not be released, until April 15th. David Ascher discusses the reasons why this Thunderbird release is being delayed in his latest blog entry: Progress Update. The main reason is it is not practical (it would be ideal though) to do a simultaneous release (Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0.0.13). The security fixes include addressing exploits with JavaScript which by default is active in Firefox, but not in Thunderbird. Plus given Firefox has a much larger user base which can be affected over this exploit it was decided to go ahead with the Firefox release first. I have to agree with David’s comments concerning the decision to push back the Thunderbird 2.0.0.13 release:

The strange thing is this: everyone on the call was unhappy about it. But I actually feel that the choice was the right one, given the circumstances.