The Burning Edge

If you're interested in how we're making Firefox start faster, follow Dietrich Ayala's weekly posts on performance.

There's an interesting thread on mozilla.dev.planning titled Scheduling a trunk alpha. With all the large changes for Gecko 1.9 and lack of alphas so far, there is concern that there aren't enough people testing trunk builds to find regressions quickly. Issues discussed in the thread include the frequency and naming of trunk alphas, milestones, or "known-good nightlies". If you're interested but don't want to read the entire thread, start with fantasai's summary. I'm curious what Burning Edge readers think of the various proposals.

Continuing my tradition of writing unofficial changelogs for Firefox releases, I compiled What's new in Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 from recent Burning Edge posts. Please point out errors, suggest better wordings for bug summaries, point out bugs I should have included but didn't (or vice versa), etc.

The Mozilla source tree Branched for Gecko 1.8 on Friday, August 12. Firefox 1.5 beta, Firefox 1.5, and Thunderbird 1.5 will all be released from the Gecko 1.8 branch.

There were a lot of last-minute checkins before the tree closed to branch at midnight Thursday night. A last-minute checkin related to split windows went in, and the Mozilla Quality Blog is asking for help testing for regressions related to this checkin. My last-minute checkin caused at least one regression.

Now that the tree has branched, the trunk is open for exciting changes such as using Cairo for all graphics, unified storage of profile data, and other big Gecko 1.9 changes. To learn about other things that might happen on the trunk between now and when Firefox 2.0 branches, see "Mozilla 2" and "Firefox" in the Mozilla Wiki.

I have not decided whether The Burning Edge will primarily follow the branch or the trunk.

I updated and reorganized the unofficial changelog for Firefox 1.1. Boris helped by suggesting core changes to include.

I now wrap Burning Edge posts in <div class="burningedge"> to make it safer to select on Burning Edge classes in RSS aggregator pages. I also added classes for builds on each OS, so people with personal Planets and similar aggregators can hide information about builds for platforms they don't use. Sample CSS files for aggregators: make fix/regression lists look like they do on The Burning Edge, hide non-Windows builds, hide non-Mac builds, hide non-Linux builds.

I look forward to seeing some of you at Mozilla Developer Day :)

I updated The Burning Edge: Bigger Picture today. There have been some interesting backend changes on the trunk, some of which will land on the aviary branch before 1.0.