status update

New Roadmap Proposal

A radical new Roadmap proposal was unveiled on Wednesday. Major changes:

1. Mozilla's default browser component will be switched from the XPFE-based Navigator to the stand-alone Phoenix browser.
2. Thunderbird (also known as Minotaur) will be developed as the default mail and newsgroups client, based on the new Phoenix toolkit.
3. The Mozilla 1.4 branch will replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path.
4. Architectural changes will be made to Gecko to make it more maintainable and extensible.
5. Changes will be made to ensure that all modules have strong leaders with the authority to make decisive and final decisions. In some cases, the need for mandatory super-review will be removed.

Note that contrary to some media reports, XUL is not going away. Read the new Mozilla Development Roadmap and Wednesday's MozillaZine article for more details.

Mozilla 1.4 Alpha

Mozilla 1.4 Alpha was released this week. New features include smooth scrolling, dynamic mouse-driven image and table resizing in Composer and HTML mail composition, NTLM authentication on Windows and P3P support. Major bookmarks improvements have also been made and both Junk Mail Controls and popup blocking have been refined.

Minotaur/Thunderbird

Builds of Minotaur/Thunderbird are now available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X at ftp.mozilla.org.

Calendar

A new build of Calendar that allows events to be printed is now available.

IMAP Quota Support

Mozilla now has basic IMAP quota support (bug 178758).

Aqua Form Controls

Several problems with Aqua form controls on Mac OS X have been fixed (bug 197094).

Accessibility

The accessibility code has been reorganized to improve the accessibility architecture (bug 199060).

Templatized Hashtable Wrappers

Benjamin Smedberg writes: "Templatized hashtable wrappers are now available in the Mozilla tree (bug 180264). See /xpcom/ds/nsTHashtable.h for a basic guide to use. If you have difficulties or questions, email Benjamin Smedberg at bsmedberg@covad.net."

Contributing to the Footprint Effort

Alec Flett has posted an easy way for C/C++ hackers to help with the footprint effort.

Tree Status

The tree is currently open (but check tinderbox for the latest status). The trunk will freeze for 1.4 Beta at midnight between Tuesday 22nd April and Wednesday 23rd April.

Fifth Anniversary of the Code Release

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the initial release of the Netscape Communicator source code.

Bug 200000

Bug 200000 was filed on Monday. The sweepstake contest was won by bradangelcyk@hotmail.com.

Staff Meeting Minutes

Minutes from the mozilla.org staff meeting of Wednesday 26th March are now available.

Independent Status Reports

Third party updates from Friday 4th April are now available.