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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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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.
The best cure for insomnia is realizing that it is already time to get up. EsteEncanto.com - Blog on technology, urban
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.
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.
[Emphasis mine.]TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
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?" `":" #");}
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.
Virtually serving coffee
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.
To follow links in this message you will need to copy and then paste them in the HTML bar since Bugzilla won't let /.ers through directly.
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.
See my journal, I write things there
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.
"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