I’ve posted some pictures of the trip on flickr, but Deb has a great set of pictures of our journey home specifically. The trip back started on Friday morning, when a bunch of us headed out to the floatplane dock at Green Lake around 10am. After about an hour or so spent waiting at the dock, we were notified that our floatplane couldn’t land because of heavy fog, so we had to make alternate arrangements to fly out of Squamish, which is about a 50 minute drive south of Whistler. These delays meant that we’d all be missing our flights out of Vancouver, so we spent nearly an hour on the phone with Jane at Air Canada, who was really quite excellent, patiently managing to rebook us all on different flights at no cost to us.

We eventually made it to Squamish by bus, where we boarded a floatplane for a 10 minute ride to Vancouver. I was surprised at how pleasant the floatplane experience was. I was expecting the ride to be bumpy and the cabin to be cramped, but it was quite comfortable, and was a great experience overall (it might have helped that I was sitting in the front row). We landed at Vancouver Harbour Water Airport in downtown Vancouver, and had to hurry to catch a cab to the airport. We just barely made it - thankfully our plane was delayed getting in so boarding was pushed back a little bit.

I was glad to be able to land in Toronto in time to head back home and get a little bit of rest before my flight to Ottawa this morning. I’m in Ottawa visiting friends and family this weekend, before heading back to Toronto on Monday night to prepare for a Tuesday morning flight to Las Vegas for Blackhat 2008. After Blackhat, I’m going to be in Calgary for a week, visiting with family and attending my cousin’s wedding, and I’m considering taking a weekend trip to London near the end of August, so I think it’s going to be a busy travel month for me… but I couldn’t think of a better way to start it out than with an exciting adventure leaving Whistler!

A large part of Firefox 3 theme work on Windows was making it possible to give Firefox a platform native look on both Vista and XP. In order to allow a given Firefox build to change it’s appearance based on the version of Windows it was running on, changes were made to our chrome registration code to allow selecting different theme packages at run-time based on operating system version. This functionality is also available to theme developers, and isn’t specific to Windows - more details can be found on MDC’s chrome registration page.

Windows theme developers might also want to make use of the new ::-moz-system-metric(windows-default-theme) pseudo-class, which allows different styling based on whether the user is currently using one of the default Windows themes (Luna/Royale/Zune/Aero, not including Classic). This feature was added to allow the Firefox 3 themes to use hard-coded colors not available in the system color set, without negatively affecting third party system themes that might specify different clashing colors. This pseudo-class therefore allows a fallback to potentially less-appealing, but more compatible, system colors for non-default themes.

Firefox 3’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9, has also received many fixes that are likely to be useful for theme developers:

• David Baron’s patch in bug 401291 made several improvements to dynamic selector matching, which means that matching of selectors that include pseudo-classes like :first-child, :only-child, and :last-child will now be updated correctly when the DOM changes. Similar fixes were made to the :empty pseudo-class and the “+” combinator, and support was added for the “~” combinator (see CSS3 for more details).
• Support was added for Animated PNG, which allows animation with 8-bit transparency. The Firefox throbber is an APNG image, for example.
• Thanks to Cairo, Gecko 1.9 supports rgba and hsla colors in CSS, which allows specifying an alpha channel in CSS colors, to allow translucency. The Firefox themes use this in several different places for better integration with platform native colors.
• Another win from Cairo is that border radii drawn using -moz-border-radius are now anti-aliased, which improves their appearance (bug 16380).
• On Mac, Gecko now supports transparent windows, thanks to work from Colin Barrett and Håkan Waara (bug 307204). This brings Mac up to par with Windows (Linux still doesn’t support partial transparency).
• On Windows, new -moz-appearance values have been introduced that map to Vista toolbar appearances (-moz-win-browsertabbar-toolbox, -moz-win-communications-toolbox, -moz-win-media-toolbox). Also new is support for system color values for “communications text” and “media text” (-moz-win-communicationstext, -moz-win-mediatext).

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to encourage theme developers to check out Themes changes in Firefox 3 on MDC. It’s not a complete guide quite yet, but it already contains some great tips to help you update your theme for Firefox 3, and it’s a great place for theme developers to share information about common pitfalls.

I thought it would be interesting to do a little bit of analysis on the 1.2GB mbox file that holds all of the bugmail I’ve received since April 2004, and to shed some light on the methods to my madness. Here’s graph that shows the number of messages per day, since April 2004 (each point is one day, the vertical axis is number of bugmail messages receieved on that day):

This might be surprising to some people. It was a surprising to me, to be honest, when I received 1882 bugmail messages on January 29th. I’m not sure exactly what happened on that day, but most of the bugmail was probably generated by Gecko 1.9/Firefox 3 blocker and approval triage. I suspect it’s not completely out of proportion compared to some other heavy Bugzilla users, though. I would be interested in seeing bugmail graphs for beltzner or mconnor or bz or dbaron, say.

Beyond the raw numbers, which I will attempt to rationalize later, there are a few things you might have noticed in the graph. The most obvious is that my bugmail volume has been increasing steadily since I first started receiving bugmail in 2004 (as far as I can tell, my first Bugzilla CC was on bug 48037 on April 11, 2004) . You can see drops in volume during the year-end holidays in 2006 and 2007 - the drops are less visible in 2004 and 2005. Weekends are also visible as pairs of dots near the bottom of the range (not as easy to see in this horizontally compressed graph).

I also wanted to see how my bugmail frequency matched up to the Firefox release cycles. Here’s a chart with the messages grouped per month, with major Firefox releases shown on the graph:

You can sort of see a pattern - a buildup of bugmail volume up until the release, with a drop right after the release. Obviously my involvement in Firefox releases has increased as time’s gone by - I had very little direct involvement in Firefox 1.0’s release, but I did quite a bit of work writing and landing patches for Firefox 2, and the bugmail volume reflects that.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Do you read all of your bugmail?
  • Yes, for some definition of “read”. A lot of the messages I receive are quick to skim - flag or dependency changes, comments I don’t need to reply to, bugs being resolved - it probably takes me only about a second or two to skim past these, and since Gmail groups messages for the same bug together, I can quickly flip through threads and see what’s changed without too much context switching. Messages that require a response or further action are usually queued up in tabs that I’ll go through later.
• How do you CC yourself on so many bugs? Do you have a script that crawls Bugzilla and CCs you?
  • Yes, I have a script. I call it MassCC, and I run it on Bugzilla twice a day. It CCs me on bugs where the sum of any 3 digits multiplied by any fourth digit is a Mersenne prime. (This algorithm means I end up only being CCed on bugs whose number contains a “1″, but this hasn’t proven to be a problem so far.)
• How do you keep track of so many bugs?
  • Most of my knowledge of currently-active and recently-fixed bugs comes from going through a “confirmed bugs filed in the past three days” query at least once every two days, moving bugs to the correct component, marking duplicates, CCing people who might be able to help fix the bug, and providing input if I know what the fix is. When I first started doing bug triage I would look at all bugs, but the number of UNCONFIRMED bugs quickly became overwhelming. A lot of other folks regularly do UNCONFIRMED bug triage, though, and I love them for it. I’ll also sometimes pay attention to the #bugs channel while when I’m on IRC, where firebot announces bug changes. If I see something interesting I’ll click over and CC myself. Having that channel’s scrollback easily available helps with quick bug lookups, when I know something happened in the past 2 or 3 days.
• I filed a bug 3 minutes ago and you’re already CCed. Are you watching me?
  • No, I am not watching you. Reed is watching you, and I have a special arrangement with him.
• I’ve noticed gavin.bugzilla at gmail dot com always gets mail, no matter what I do in Bugzilla. What’s up with that?
  • That’s an address that’s been set up as a “global watcher”. It gets mail for every change on bugzilla.mozilla.org. I set it up a while ago when the global watcher capability was added to b.m.o, but nowadays I very rarely actually use it. It’s mailbox is currently 37% full (2427 MB of 6480 MB), with 287088 unread threads. If it wasn’t for the “New bug filed” notifications having a different subject line than the mail for changes to the bug itself, the unread count would reflect the number of bugs that have been modified since the account was created.
• Isn’t all this bugmail too much?
  • It’s starting to be a little too much, yes. Things should get better as Firefox 3 is wrapped up, but I’ll probably adjust my bug watching habits anyways, to try and reduce the amount of mail I need to sort through. I currently have 49 addresses in my Bugzilla “watch list”, most of them generic QA contacts that let me receive bugmail for an entire Bugzilla component. I can probably reduce my overall bugmail volume a fair bit without really diminishing my ability to “know what’s going on”. I want to be careful not to narrow my focus too much, though, since I do like being able to keep track of things happening in the Mozilla world that aren’t necessarily related to my job.