10.0.6 available, QTE goes beta, and more Mozilla soap operatics

The RC for 10.0.6 is now available. Please give it a spin. Assuming no issues, it will be released to the yearning masses on Monday evening. Here are the release notes.

As the release notes will intimate, 10.0.6 has the JIT latency patch and a preventative (hopefully) tweak to the JIT trampoline to avoid a crash which cropped up early in the 14.0 cycle. Unfortunately, 10.0.6 is also missing something now: the tracejit. Although severely gutted and not fully functional, TM was left in 10.x for purposes of comparison against JM+TI. However, one of the security patches in this release causes the tracejit to no longer compile and breaks the build, and I am not entirely certain it can be repaired even if it were worth it to repair, so this last remnant of TraceMonkey is now sadly gone. If you were one of those users who turned off JM+TI and turned on TM against my advice, you will no longer have JavaScript acceleration; it will simply run in the interpreter. It's time to come home and turn methodjit back on. Sorry. Remove your hats, and let us have a moment of silence for TraceMonkey, which brought us a long way.

(moment of silence)

I have also promoted the QuickTime Enabler to beta, and created a QTE wiki page to promote it to users. To maintain compatibility with 10.x, this is the same version (v.114) we used for the QTE alpha. Feedback from the larger user base will then be used to create a 17.0-specific QTE. Unfortunately, as I explained earlier, the Jetpack library I used to create the QTE does not lend itself to making the QTE a permanent part of the browser, so it will remain an optional add-on.

A postscript to the Mozilla drama I reported on two posts ago. Gervase Markham is a solid, stand-up guy who has helped us out several times, but I am unhappy with this blog post saying these kinds of Mozilla discussions should go underground. Moving soulsearching or controversial discussions like Jono's into a secured, less-public forum is the last thing that Mozilla needs. Besides the self-serving interest that having Mozilla discussions in public fora allows ecosystem projects like us to have a voice in things coming down the pike (none of us are paid Mozilla staffers and while I have a seat on Mozilla's security group, I am only a contributor and not a regular "Mozillian"), the upshot that should have been learned is that Mozilla didn't listen to community frustration until it boiled over. And Asa Dotzler, G-d love him, has regularly and often made controversial policy statements in public for freaking years; they just happen to be controversial statements that MoCo agrees with. Frankly, I don't think "a safe place to vent" is really the issue here.

More to the point, limiting these kind of discussions to secret dark corners makes the project just as closed as, say, WebKit, and increasingly Mozilla's openness is the only thing that makes it distinctive nowadays. I have long complained in this blog about public sniping of a project without involving the creators to make it better, but what's worse is insulating real discussion of real concerns away from constructive analysis. We're open here. We don't restrict comments, even if I totally disagree. We solicit them, for better or worse; just don't do it behind our back. If Mozilla pulls this kind of metadiscussion inwards, they will lose the community feeling and sense of open ownership that makes them unique. Weathering such discussion would be painful for anyone and it's hard to listen to, no doubt. But it's important that they do, and that process of public involvement is a big part of what makes Mozilla special.