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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."
All in all, bug for bug, line by line, even accounting for the massive differences in complexity (mozilla is by far a more complex project that IE ever wanted to be), I'd have to say that Mozilla has less show-stopping bugs and fewer exploits than IE.
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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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from the mozilla FAQ: "Mozilla 1.0 is a fully functional technology demo for those interested in seeing what can be done with Mozilla technology, and those who want to create Mozilla-based products and packages. The intended target audience is the development community. " so, it's not really a product. but a great 'demo' imho. if you want to use the 'commercial' suite, use netscape.
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A bug in mozilla??? No way, you've got to be jokeing!!!
Seriously though, although Mozilla has it's faults, (this being a prime example). It is still the cutting edge of browser technology. I mean, theres one feature that wins over every person I've recommended Mozilla to: the ability to stop pop ups from apearing. ALthough Mozilla is still rough around the edges, it is still my browser of choice.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Finding Bugs like this is proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser. With open source and lots of people contributing, bugs are found and elliminated quickly.
Microsoft IE on the other hand, bugs take time to find and even more time to repair due to the slow reaction of a large organization. This is probably why we hear so much about Mozilla bugs, they're far easier to uncover than bugs in IE or other browser.
PErsonally, I think Mozilla users should concider this a Good Thing, it means that your browser of choice is getting better!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
IMHO documents that completely rely on ECMAScript are inherently broken anyway.
What I'd like to know (and this is NOT meant as a flame any way, I love mozilla), is HOW exactly do big bugs like this get into final releases? I mean, the 1.2 release was more than a month behind what was scheduled on the roadmap, and yet it still ends up with this in it? Is it just the number of people who don't bother with nightlies or reporting bugs? I would think there would be enough people using the nightlies to find fairly significant bugs like this. Perhaps the fine mozilla people need to add a "gamma" release after "alpha" and "beta" but before "final"? Have the gamma and final be seperated by one week, and ONLY incorporate bugfixes which don't affect major parts of the code? I don't quite know what the answer is, but it seems something should be done. All in all though, great browser.
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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it's rather the way these bugs are treated and fixed. With a MS product, some bugs are not acknowledged until they have a fix, sometime months after the first discovery.
with an open source model, bugs are public and are generally much quicker to be patched.
The best cure for insomnia is realizing that it is already time to get up. EsteEncanto.com - Blog on technology, urban
So today I downloaded 1.2. This is quite upsetting.
Anyway, in order to save Bugzilla the crush, I'm pasting the bug report (#182500) here. It seems that the main issues are broken user-defined XML tags, broken document.write(), and checkins to the 1.2 branch missing in the release.
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You have most likely the Google safesearch on. A search for "nude" (totally randomly chosen ) generated 13,500 hits with the safesearch on, 135,000 with safesearch off. Turn it on on http://www.google.com/preferences
No, if this were an IE bug, sites would have been designed around it in the first place and no one would ever notice except for the web designers.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
That's actually not entirely true.
One of the websites I helped build is broken in 1.2 (just noticed it yesterday). This was working fine in 1.2b, as well as in a homebuilt CVS version somewhere in the cycle leading up to 1.2.
I think a "Release Candidate" should have been put out, which when tested for a while should have become 1.2 final without any further changes.
Pulling the release is handling the bugs better than MS!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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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As Mozilla issues go, this has got to be one of the more annoying ones, but apparently nobody wants to actively work on it. "Composer" is actually not a bad WYSIWYG html editor at all - it has alot of potential. But as long as it strips / corrupts PHP and other scripting code, it will never be very useful to anyone doing anything beyond the most trivial of web pages.
The Mozilla-dev folks need to wake up and realize that just about any web designer these days is using some degree of scripting.. Composer needs to at the very least ignore (and not corrupt) scripting blocks. Composer is quite an excellent html editor generally, but as long as it continues to act brain-damaged in regards to any unknown blocks it encounters, it is not going to be truly useful for anybody other than your Great Aunt Emma working on her Geocities homepage.
Right now, if you need PHP and still want to do your page design in Composer, you have only two options: (1) Every time you tweak the page in Composer, insert all your PHP by hand, or (2) Put your own "#PHPBlock1" tags in the html and have a script replace it with the neccessary PHP code later. Having to do either is annoying. Composer simply shouldn't mangle PHP blocks at all.
I'm pretty sure there's another outstanding bug regarding the fact that Composer cannot save 'fragments' - if you're merely designing a table or template to be generated via PHP, there is no way to have Mozilla save it as a fragment, without header tags etc. A bit of a nitpick, but really, how much effort would it take to code in a "Save as fragment" option?
Mozilla is quite an impressive accomplishment for open source, I really do think Mozilla smokes IE hands down these days.. but these Composer bugs should have been fixed long ago - not enough people care about this aspect of Mozilla. A little bit of work here could go a long ways towards undercutting commercial HTML editors in a big way.
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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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Is it not enough reason that this is a bug? We should stop release for all bugs! But seriously....
A big reason is that DHTML is pretty much just a way of saying the W3C DOM and a few DOM Level 0 (no spec) APIs. This bug effectively cripples our standards support and I would definitely call that serious.
On top of that, with every release, there is a chance that some embeddor will want to base their product off of it. Embeddors generally like DHTML, and this would be a show stopper for them.
Indeed, this bug means that it's impossible to moderate using win 9x and IE. (Let's see the smart arse replies to that one)
"The Mozilla team had been alerted to major bugs which only recently appeared in the browser"
Sorry. Just because you filed a bug and posted a comment on another does not mean the Mozilla team was alerted. If there is a showstopper bug, filing it in Bugzilla does not guarantee it will get noticed if everyone is busy with final preparations for a release, and trying to get ready for the impending alpha. Don't forget that the people involved with Mozilla get tons of email from bugs, review requests, etc. as well as have real lives in which they eat turkey and go Christmas shopping. Bugs sometimes slip through the cracks. Hop on to IRC next time and make sure that one of the drivers, or even a developer or QA person knows about your bug if you think it is an absolute showstopper.
It definitely sucks that this bug was in a release. But things happen. Hopefully it won't again.
Caveat: I use Mozilla as my primary browser. That said, I'd like to make this observation:
It seems to me that we spend a lot of time on Slashdot talking about Mozilla as a premiere project of the open source community. However, my impression is that Mozilla is largely still an internal project of Netscape (and by extension of AOL Time Warner). This impression is based on, among other things, the very large number of @netscape.com email addresses that pervade Bugzilla, the mozilla.org web site, etc. I can't believe that Netscape's engineers restrict themselves to working solely on their release branch of the Mozilla codebase during working hours.
I don't think it at all diminishes the magnitude of the Mozilla project's achievement to say that it has made progress largely under the aegis of AOL/TW. But we should at least be honest that Mozilla is furthering the agenda of a very large corporation that is just as rapacious and profit-motivated as Microsoft.
Anyone have any hard data about the investment that AOL has made in Mozilla development?
but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we".
/.ers celebrate like a bunch of immature teenagers, fogetting that OSS is not going to succeed because how bad the competition is, but because how good a given OSS is.
Hello? For years when IE was still in its infancy, every bug was celebrated and shown as "proof of incompetency" on Microsoft's part.
Even now every time a severe bug is found in Microsoft
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
The DHTML bug was caused by an 1-character-incorrect backout of a patch that I did in too much of a hurry (removed the entry from the list, but didn't adjust the count). Mea Culpa. This happened 2 weeks before 1.2 final, but most testers were working on 1.3 by that time, and the ones that weren't didn't visit the type of DHTML that causes the problem (most DHTML doesn't have the problem). There was a separate problem where the wrong files were tagged (some recent fixes weren't included).
We're fixing these and will have an updated build up soon. How long would Microsoft take to fix this sort of problem?... (Let alone tell you why the problem happened.)
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/