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Mozmill 2.0 released!

Believe it or don’t believe it. But this announcement is for real! Really, you can trust me! If you still think it’s a joke I can say: even with the expected release of Mozmill 2.0 was like Duke Nukem Forever over the past 3 years, we finally finished all bits and got it released yesterday. Check it out yourself on pypi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mozmill.

So the whole process of working on a new release of Mozmill might have been started when we branched for the final 1.5 release, which was on Aug 23rd, 2010. Since then various people spent more or less time on its code to get it improved and lesser buggy. Also given some major refactoring at the beginning of the development of version 2.0, and lot of other feature requests from QA and other teams, we were working mostly double-tracked. Means, we have not only implemented new features for 2.0 but also had to backport those onto the hotfix-1.5 branch. That caused a lot of work for us. And because we weren’t working full-time on that project either, the time went by so fast.

It’s interesting to see that on Oct 10th, 2011, we released an RC1 for Mozmill 2.0 because we thought it would be the right time to get it out soon. But since then an amazing number of additional 276 changesets have been landed, and another nearly 2 years passed by. Amazing how your own schedule can be busted. But there was no way around.

In the last couple of months our Automation Development team has fully taken-over the project, and promised to get it finished and released. It was a kinda tricky and hard task, especially with all the additional bugs we have identified, which not only caused broken tests but also crashes and dataloss. Thanks to the help of our awesome contributors, who spend tons of hours to put a nice and polished version of Mozmill together. We wouldn’t have been here without your help. A big big thanks!

One of the things we are most proud of is the backward compatibility of Mozmill 2.0. We made it that as a Mozmill 1.5 user you shouldn’t see any difference. Any method and property available in Mozmill 1.5 is still present in 2.0, but has been marked as deprecated. With that you will be able to run all of your tests with both versions, and you can transition over step by step. There are indeed some new ways how to work with elements, which are explained on our MDN Mozmill page.

One very impressive improvement we have seen a couple of days ago, is the speed how Mozmill tests are getting executed. Compared to Mozmill 1.5 we can see a drop of the duration by a factor of 2.5! That’s two and a half times faster! I think already because of that you should not miss to at least test Mozmill 2.0!

As usual please give us feedback via email or on IRC about your own experiences and please report any bug you have discovered. If you like hacking and want to help us with the implementation of new features or fixing broken behavior, then have a look at our Mozmill repository on Github.

Soon I will come up with our plan for the future of Mozmill. And what I can say as of now, there is a lot to come…

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