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DHTML Bug Found in Mozilla 1.2
joyoflinux writes "The people at Mozilla have announced that Mozilla 1.2 contained a bug that caused sites that use DHTML to fail (more on the front page). They have pulled 1.2 from the releases page, pending a 1.2.1 release."
They retract a release because of this?
I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.
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I'd have to say that Mozilla has less show-stopping bugs and fewer exploits than IE.
Until I hear different, that's my impression, too. But personally, I think the Phoenix project based on Mozilla has a lot of promise. It is a blazingly fast browser and is quick to startup, too. Amazing!
At least this bug today wasn't a security-related bug, like *cough* IE *cough* Outlook *cough* windows *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* goddamn! *cough* *cough* Microsoft
feck
*cough* *cough* *cough* must... hit.. submit...
and in a MS product it would have been called a minor rendering problem or something equally undescriptive.
go figure. Closed source zealots are always ready to jump at the announce of a "major" oss bug -_-
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Speaking as an OSS zealot myself, I have to agree with the basic logic of your statement. It would be better for us, I think, if we just handled the bugs better than MS (not hard, just fix 'em quickly and move on) and demonstrated our superior capabilities constructively, rather than generating FUD that would make MS' collective dick hard.
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...when I do an image search on Google, I get less results when using Mozilla as opposed to using IE5 (using the same exact search terms)? I'm not trying to start something, just something I noticed and wondered if I had a setting wrong on Mozilla or something.
I think the basic problem is that 1.0.1 and 1.1 works so well that few people bothered to test the 1.2 alpha and beta. Hence serious bugs showing up in the release.
and in other news: this is what IBM, Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, etc. etc. find through testing every day. They find some, they miss some. Somebody found one in Mozilla. Why is this news?
proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser
The points about spin have already been covered, so can I ask how many banking sites you have tried to use recently?
Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).
Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows. The Mozilla-on-remote-X bug is so longstanding that there is now a lobbying campaign to get it fixed...
So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet, or if it worked over a network.
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Usually I'm delighted to hear when Mozilla releases a new browser as, up until recently, Mozilla was my browser of choice. But when I heard about the Mozilla 1.2 release I was just disappointed.
The Mozilla team had been alerted to major bugs which only recently appeared in the browser like this one and some of these (the latter link also has the comment in which a few poeple suggest Mozilla 1.2 should be unreleased) and yet still the team proceeded with this release. I'm not pretending that it's everyone's experience, but certainly as far as my own experience, Mozilla 1.2 is the first Mozilla browser to step further backwards than forwards - and I know I'm not the only one who thinks that. IMHO, it's a shame that such a great browser which was really beginning to show its potential had to make such a disappointing release. And for all that, I have to wonder what were the critical changes that led to all the aforementioned bugs (the implementation of type ahead searching!?!).
It's too late for me, I've stopped using Mozilla on my Mac (still using the Gecko-based Chimera though) and have halted upgrades of it on my PC, so I guess all there is to say is better luck next time and hopefully we'll be fortunate enough to never see a release as bad as this one ever again.
An important reason to use Mozilla is security. An important concern for anyone trying eCommerce on the web is security. eCommerce web sites often use cookies and they should use https.
The bug is reported in Bugzilla but it appears that some people can circumvent this with script preferences. Regrettably I can't. See also the slashdot thread from the original 1.2 announcement here.
I have kept my 1.1 installation under Linux and still have IE under Win 2K.
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Long story short, a patch got checked in on the trunk before we branched, it caused problems, we noticed it and asked that it got backed out on both the trunk and the 1.2 branch. It got backed out OK on the trunk, but somehow it didn't get fully backed out on the branch...
From the bug: "It looks like the 1.2-branch backout was done incorrectly. The 9 was not changed to an 8."
I missed that day on Slashdot, but I just read that BBC piece, and that article doesn't support your argument. Your argument is that IE has more security flaws than other browsers. While that may or may not be true, the BBC article simply states that IE should be avoided because it's the most targeted: "The easiest way to avoid parasite programs, he says, is to stop using Internet Explorer because it is targeted by many of the adware and spyware companies." This advice is akin to saying that one shouldn't buy a Honda because they are targeted by thieves -- it's not saying that Hondas are easier to steal than other cars. Likewise, the article doesn't say that IE is more vulnerable than other browsers but merely that it's more targeted. IE is definitely more vulnerable than other browsers, but the article doesn't argue it for you.
Neither does that other article. I actually read the whole whitepaper and the article isn't about how Unix is better than Windows (in fact, right in the abstract of the paper, it says that Windows provides much better throughput and slightly better performance than Unix!). Rather, it describes the process by which Hotmail was migrated from Unix to Windows. There are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms and it discusses them well. It describes in good detail how it went about converting the platform and the challenges as they were presented and resolved. It criticizes Windows where appropriate, but it doesn't say that Unix is the better OS as the Slashdot headline and blurb suggest.
I was ok with your post up until you referencing the other articles because they make no sense.
Why would anyone want to use the "commercial suite", when the technology demo has more features and is more stable, in my experience?
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Just another quick comment...
Tell me what you would rather have... A company that hired its own Quality Assurance team and kept all bugs they found quiet...Or a mass audience from all over the world testing the software and reporting what they find?
With that being said... There really isn't any other way for the Mozilla team to let there mass audience "or shall we say...testers" know that they found a bug and that it will be patched soon?
And would you people stop comparing Mozilla to IE... IE has its own set of troubles... Let it fail on its own...
I use Mozilla in Windows 2000 and Gentoo Linux. I haven't had any major problems with the Linux release (though the announced DHTML bug is in both), but the Windows release has been buggy as hell. This in contrast to 1.1 which was only somewhat buggy.
- It forgets the previous pages visited every so often,
- Every 10th or so time I visit a page, it announces "The entry point @113WINAPAITSP@@% was not found in [some DLL file]",
- It randomely decides to ignore the mouse wheel, the keyboard, or the mouse altogether, but recovers if I switch to another window and use that device,
- It places some banner ads in the middle of a page. For example, on the StorageReview.com, the bottom banner is often smack dab in the middle of the last message in any given forum thread,
- It reports all downloaded images, be they 200 bytes or 5MB, as "1K" in the download manager,
- It decides that some files are text files, whether they are or not, and insists on displaying them in the browser rather than downloading them. RAR archives and PNG images do not look good in a web browser window. This bug has been present in many versions and is ignored Bugzilla, with claims that it is the website telling Mozilla what MIME type the file is. Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.
Bitch, bitch, moan, moan. The Mozilla team is still doing an excellent job making the world's most powerful browser suite. I do, however, hope they run releases through a bit more QA before the next release.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
You may be referring to bug 39573, which is about pages with a large number of drop-down (or other) widgets. This isn't due to legacy Mosaic code per se. The problem with recent IE's may be due to code that's meant to give fast "Back" and "Forward" speed by keeping recent pages around in laid-out form - which means a lot of memory and (OS) widgets. Spyglass (which IE2 was based on) had such features.
The problem in Mozilla is based on the number of widgets that need to be created. A solution (which requires a fair bit of coding - care to help?) is to instantiate popups and the like lazily. Another thing that would help with responsiveness would be to have a more-interruptable reflow.
If you're really interested, get involved. http://www.mozilla.org/