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December 21, 2005

Spread some holiday cheer with Thunderbird RC2!

We have Thunderbird RC2 builds available for your holiday enjoyment. They can be found here. Please note that the update channel is live and available for testing, so we encourage you to try that out if you are on an Beta2 or RC1 build.

If you have some time between drinking your eggnog and your last minute holiday shopping, download the bits and take them for a test drive. We did test these bits in a testing day earlier, but we would appreciate wider feedback for those that did not have a chance to participate in the test day.

The usual rules apply:

Important Notes:

(1) Please indicate which platform/OS you are using.
(2) If you crash please include your talkback ID
(3) If you have extensions installed, please identify which ones in your post.
(4) Please check the list of Bugs Filed Today and Hot Bugs in Bugzilla before filing bugs to reduce the number of dupes filed.

Thanks!

Posted by marcia at 2:09 PM | Comments (678)

December 19, 2005

Printing Bugs in Firefox

With focus on so many other cool features in Firefox 1.5, some of the basic features get little love these days. So, I think it's about time to take a closer look at printing. That's right, printing! We all know there is plenty of content on the web that needs to be preserved on good ol' paper...so printing is often a very important feature that gets overlooked. Everyone has probably had trouble printing a web page, news article, blog post, image or forum thread at one point. I know I have... so it'll be nice to see a few critical bugs get fixed in the next release.

A quick query in Bugzilla for recent Printing related bugs returns plenty of open ones. Here are a couple queries (for bugs changed since 10/06/2005):

  1. Firefox Bugs with "print" in Summary
  2. Core Printing Bugs

The problem is, it's hard to figure out which ones are the most important. So here is how you can help:

  1. Dig through Bugzilla for recent (or even old) printing bugs. You can stick to my queries above or find your own bugs.
  2. Identify bugs that meet one or more of the following criteria:
    • Printing problems related to the top 100 websites (you can go by the Alexa Global Rankings)
    • Data loss printing issues (not being able to print all the content on a page, only having a page or two printed when there should be a lot more, or other similar bugs that don't give you what you expect when printing something)
    • Regressions from Firefox 1.0.x -> 1.5.x
    • Any critical bug that you can convince developers to fix for the next release to improve the user experience with Firefox. This is very subjective, but if millions of users are going to be affected by a bug, we should put it on the radar.

  3. Narrow down the cause of the problem the best you can so that the developer has a better chance at debugging it. Basically, find testcases in the bugs or develop your own simplified testcase that can be easily reproduced.
  4. Test with the latest versions of Firefox 1.0.x, Firefox 1.5.x, and the nightly Trunk builds. Figure out if it's a bug across all releases or if it's a recent regression.
  5. Post your testing results and comments in the relevant bug and leave a comment here at the blog with a link to the bug.

Keep in mind that although a few people may want a bug fixed, it doesn't mean there will be anyone around to fix it. BUT, if you can pull together enough support and plead your case by doing the research, submitting a testcase (or even a patch), and showing others how to reproduce... you will have a better chance at seeing some traction on your bug.

A few tips:

  1. To save trees, you can always just use Print Preview to see what the printing results will look like. From the testing I have done so far, I have realized that what you see in the Print Preview is what you will end up seeing on paper. So most of the bugs that you will find will be exposed in Print Preview...
  2. Print Preview and Page Setup are closely related, so make sure you check all the settings found in both places to make sure what you are seeing is indeed a bug (or not).
  3. Try to test websites that you feel a lot of people will be printing from...like those I mentioned earlier: news, blogs, forums, images/photos, etc.

Posted by jay at 5:43 PM | Comments (313)

CPU usage while using Thunderbird RC2

I am running Thunderbird RC2 on my Mac, and noticed that it seems to be running high on the CPU side. If Thunderbird users out there can monitor their CPU usage, real memory and virtual memory and report back in this blog, it would be helpful. So the data we need is as follows:

(1) CPU usage while you are running Thunderbird RC2.
(2) Real Memory usage while you are running Thunderbird RC2
(3) Virtual Memory usage while you are running Thunderbird RC2
(4) Whether or not you shut down Thunderbird RC2 when you finish using it (I don't, I actually just put my machine to sleep)
(5) Main extensions that you use in Thunderbird

I am using the en-US RC2 candidate build which can be found here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/1.5rc2-candidates/.
As far as extensions, I do have FoxClocks and Display Mail User Agent running on this profile.

If you use the Mac, there is a utility called "Activity Monitor" that will provide all of this information.

Posted by marcia at 10:57 AM | Comments (308)

December 15, 2005

Results of Thunderbird Community Testing Day

Thanks to all of you that participated in our Thunderbird community testing day on Tuesday. Here are the results of the testing: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_QA_Community:ThunderBird_1.5_RC2_Community_Test_Day#Results

Our top testers on Tuesday were: osaier, cleriic and bisi. They will all receive a Thunderbird tshirt so they can spread the Thunderbird word.

This is the first testing event where we used the Litmus tool. If you have any specific feedback regarding the tool, we would love to hear about it.

Stay tuned for future testing events!

Posted by marcia at 11:07 AM | Comments (457)

December 9, 2005

Thunderbird Community Testing Day planned for Tuesday, Dec 13

We have candidate builds for Thunderbird 1.5 RC2 and we thought this would be a great opportunity to run another community testing day. The plan is to hold this event next Tuesday, December 13th from 6am PST/9am EST until 5pm PST/8pm EST.

We will be using the Litmus tool for this testing event. There is an FAQ posted to our QA community wiki that will have specific instructions on how this testing day will run. We will run this event similar to the way we ran the last Firefox RC3 testing day - members of the QA team will be in an IRC channel to answer questions if you need help at some point along the way.

This should be an exciting event. Please join us!

Posted by marcia at 4:15 PM | Comments (310)

December 6, 2005

Help with some trunk testing

We just made a change to handling of windowless plug-ins . Any testing of such plug-ins (flash and java can both be windowless depending on the markup in the webpage, iirc) would be most helpful....

The bug in question is bug 266933.

Posted by marcia at 9:54 AM | Comments (297)