status update

maintained by Tim Rowley <tor@cs.brown.edu>

Last Updated Thursday December 6, 2001

This status update page is updated every week. To get updates and news throughout the week you are invited to check out mozillaZine, a site devoted to Mozilla advocacy.

Previous Updates

Module Updates
Mailnews
December 4
Submitted by Scott Putterman <scottip@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • More performance work going on. We are now at a point where folder loading is faster than 4.7x and message display is equal to 4.7x on the performance machine (266 MHz, 128MB RAM Windows)
  • A number of leaks were fixed and we identified more places where we weren't closing databases which should help lower footprint.
  • Resolved as fixed 30 bugs.

Performance and Footprint

  • Most of the mail team is going to focus on performance in 0.9.8
  • Look here for the performance page.
  • Look here for current performance numbers.
  • General
    • Varada's changes to get mail on Tinderbox are almost ready to be turned on.
    • Varada's timeline work should enable us to start getting daily mail performance numbers.
  • Folder Loading
    • David identified outliner row painting as the largest component of loading a 1600 message local folder. He found several fixes to the outliner and mail/news that will reduce row painting dramatically in some situations .
    • David made it so we cache the most recent thread requested of msg db which should speed up painting when in threaded mode.
  • Message Display
    • Scott's work over the past few weeks has resulted in a 25-30% improvement in message display. We are now equal to 4.76! He's continuing to look for more improvements.
    • Cavin has a fix for making it so that we don't download attachments multiple times when displaying particular messages. You could encounter this case if you have a message that has an attachment we can display inline and an attachment we can't (i.e. a .gif and a .doc).
  • Delete Message
    • Scott spent time looking at delete + selecting the next message with Quantify. He removed some unnecessary command updating that was happening when we delete and then select the next message.
  • Compose Window
    • Jean-Francois continued looking into why a compose window sometimes popups unexpectedly when they recycle compose window pref is turned on. This is the one bug preventing us from turning this on by default.
  • Mail Startup
    • Cavin met with Samir to talk about Sidebar performance. We knew from previous findings that the Sidebar can take up to 25% of the time to open the mail window. It looks like Samir has some fixes which may get a 10-12% improvement. We can also look into delaying sidebar loading.
  • Footprint
    • Navin fixed a bunch of leaks.
    • Navin found that we weren't closing databases when searching. His fix should cut down bloat when searching.
    • Navin found that we're still not closing databases in some cases when switching folders. David has checked in a fix for this.

Mailnews Accomplishments

  • Cavin
    • Started looking into a top crasher involving IMAP and the Mac.
  • Dan
    • Started working on tasklist and plans for SSL- LDAP and LDAP offline replication
    • Did a bit of nanozilla perf testing; handed off bug for landing nanozilla changes to Tuxia folks.
    • Triaged bugs into current mozilla milestones.
  • Scott
    • Removed some dead JS code from messenger startup.
    • Landed temporary smime UI (no more alerts with signed messages!).
  • Jean-Francois
    • Worked with Cavin on message display attachment improvement mentioned above.
  • Varada
    • Started looking into a top crasher when scrolling through the header dropdown in the compose window.
  • Seth
    • Made it so the home page link is "blue" like the other links in the addressbook card preview pane.
    • Fixed a bug where removing expired articles wasn't remove all expired articles in certain cases.
  • Sean
    • Finished the filter dialog work for labels.
    • Started looking into accessibility bugs.
  • Rajiv
    • Triaged remaining Simple MAPI bugs and came up with estimates for the most import ones.
    • Wrote a task list and came up with estimates for finishing up Simple MAPI
    • Modified the mapi32.dll so that it displays a message when each API is called. This will be used by QA with different Windows apps to figure out which options of these apps use which MAPI functions.
Editor
December 5
Submitted by Daniel Glazman <glazman@netscape.com>

This week

  • Kin (Layout Team)
    • Reviews/Super Reviews.
    • Checked in fixes for:
      • Bug 69398 ({label,hr,br}:after {content: ":"} repeats creation of : with mouse movement)
      • Bug 111264 (nsTextFrame::SetSelected() calls Invalidate() with empty rect.)
    • During investigation on the impact of my fix for 69398, discovered that changing the class attribute on a given node does not remove existing or create new :before or :after frames. Did some tracing around to find out why. Bug to be filed.
    • Currently debugging Bug 106489 (Text entered in box does not appear)
    • Triaged and did some preliminary debugging on various editor bugs.
    • Discussed various 'find' issues with akkana.
  • Joe Francis (Layout Team)
    • ew code reviews
    • lots of bug triage
    • fixed, got reviewed, and landed bugs:
      • 106274 : toolbar colorpicker feedback broken when selection is collapsed
      • 97259 : caret sometimes drawn on line above a blank line when it should be on blank line. r=fm; sr=kin
    • landed earlier fixes for:
      • 45888 : center followed by heading 2: text doesn't take on heading 2
      • 102754 : Lists with Headings applied do not create new list items when return entered
      • 9835 : Indent button behaves differently if <li> contains two <br> r=fm; sr=kin
    • patches for bugs:
      • 101342 : Extraneous <br> when <td> content is <textarea>
      • 104499 : when using the decrease indent, it hops to the end of the pr
    • also worked some on resolving some whitespace issues exposed by recent deletion work
  • Akkana (Composer Team)
    • 50131 : Allow passing filename arguments on the command line.
    • Took on the project of rewriting Find (bugs 97157 , 95461 , 51550 etc.) since Kin was overloaded. Spent most of the week working on that; have code which is faster than the old code in most cases but needs to be tuned to avoid string copies. Currently blocked by string class problems, working with jag and dbaron to resolve them. Spent some time discussing the design with Kin.
    • Discussed some of our plaintext problems with folks on IRC, ended up investigating and taking over bug 94176 (Text copied from table with multiple rows has no CR/LF) but need help from Joe to understand why this regressed and how to fix it.
  • Kathy (Composer Team)
    • Save is now checked in along with some other fixes. The last thing that needs to happen is a coordinated checkin with Adam Lock. He is updating nsIWebBrowserPersist to meet our needs. Once that is checked in, I can complete my checkin which uses that and removes the save apis from nsIEditor.
    • Worked on gathering data on possible performance or memory bloat areas within Composer.
    • Filed a bunch of bugs
    • Investigated blocker bug yesterday and pointed out problem (confirmed with cmanske).
    • Code reviews.
    • Did a pass on all EDITORBASE bugs, picked out some which I think we should defer.
  • Charley (Composer Team)
    • 0.9.7 bugs fixed and checked in:
      • 10937 (Bugscape-EDITORBASE) Spelling dialog layout problems
      • 112463 (EDITORBASE) Pref panel DTD file typo
      • 108086 (EDITORBASE) XUL 1.0 syntax changes for tabs in editor window and dialogs.
      • 103855 (EDITORBASE) List all headings as possible anchors in List Properties dialog.
      • 90229 (EDITORBASE) Remove forcing of "valid" file extensions for image URLs. This also fixed 110068 , allowing ".bmp" images in Windows.
      • 95633 (EDITORBASE) Simple button text change ("Remove") in Advanced Edit dialog.
    • Reviewed Neil's latest Insert Form elements work.
    • Worked on 108196 (Underline doesn't show up when inserting link). Thanks to Kin for figuring out the real cause: When using "SetInlineProperty()", if we insert an anchor node without the "href" set, and then set the "href" later, the layout redraw doesn't show the link underline. A new patch is attached for consideration. Akkana points out that all this is done within a batch, so it's still very hard to understand why this bug occurs.
  • Daniel (Layout Team)
    • worked on string usage in composer
    • helped Charley tracking the cause of a very annoying regression on links
    • wrote a document on strategy for Composer

Next week

  • Kin
    • Work on 0.9.7 bugs.
    • Finish reviewing glazman's CSS Composer diffs.
    • Check in fix for edt0.9.4 bug 74383 into the 0.9.4 Branch after QA verifies it.
  • Joe
    • knock of as many more 097's as possible
    • retarget bugs to appease bug god
  • Akkana
    • Continue find/replace work.
    • Get Joe's help and come up with a fix for 94176
  • Kathy
    • Check in remainder of Save changes (already approved; waiting for dependency to be checked in first).
    • Work with Adam Lock on his nsIWebBrowserPersist regarding publishing's needs.
    • Remove nsIDiskDocument
  • Daniel
    • continue the above
  • Charley
    • Continue on 0.9.7 bug fixing.
    • Review UI portion of Glazman's big CSS patch
    • Help testing and reviewing Neil's Form dialogs.

Previous Updates