Mozilla Updates Firefox To Appease FarmVille Users

CWmike writes "Just three days after adding plug-in crash protection to Firefox, Mozilla rushed out another release because people playing FarmVille on Facebook complained that their browser was shutting down the game. Although complaints about Firefox's quick killing of hung plug-ins were not limited to FarmVille, that game was the squeaky wheel that got the update grease. 'A lot of people play FarmVille. To ignore those people for any length of time could have a significant effect on Firefox's share of browser users,' said Firefox user Jeff Rivett on Bugzilla Sunday. 'The problem already existed, but the perceived impact suddenly changed, giving it a much higher priority.'"

Comments

Need for more varied beta testers

[Kelson]

I'd been wondering why Mozilla rushed out an update so quickly after releasing 3.6.4, because they'd been testing that crash protection for months. I think I installed the first release candidate at the beginning of May, and they released several more candidates between that time and the final release.

Now we know: The type of user who is willing to beta-test a web browser is a lot less likely to play Farmville, or else has a super-fast computer that Farmville doesn't hang. Otherwise, this would have been caught a month ago.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[al0ha]

Yeah, they should pay my wife to do it, she's a perfect candidate. One time she asked me if I had, "Turned off the Internet." Sweet as can be but not exactly tech savvy. ;-)

Of she would not have helped in this case, she is far to savvy to waste her time with FarmVille.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[VirginMary]

So your wife suspected you of having generated several massive nuclear explosions above ground to generate EMPs? Wow, she must think you're really bad ass!

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Barrinmw]

What sucks is, for some reason 3.6.6 is preventing me from watching videos on youtube and such *ahem*. Damn you Mozilla!

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Arctic Dragon]

Firefox 3.6.4 had 7 release candidates, significantly more than most releases have.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Jurily]

While my initial reaction was along the lines of "Fuck Farmville", on second thought I want it to work.

If it doesn't, then the hordes of zombies playing it go back to IE, and that particular nightmare will never end. Imagine your favorite corporate internal system not getting upgraded just because some middle manager couldn't grow virtual corn anymore.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[ydrol]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[RobertM1968]

What sucks is, for some reason 3.6.6 is preventing me from watching videos on youtube and such *ahem*. Damn you Mozilla!

YT works fine for me - though I do seem to have to push the play button on some videos (but I suspect that is because more people are setting their videos not to autoplay).

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[enter to exit]

hello Mr.Obama, president SIR!

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[xero314]

Wouldn't this equate to asking if you turned off the internet connection, say possibly your modem or how ever you are connected to the internet. I mean we often say phrases like "turn out the light" though in reality we turn off the power to the light. So to imply someone is not tech savvy because they as if you had "turned off the internet" is a little disingenuous at best. I'm also not sure that being tech savvy has anything to do with playing farmville, I would just think that one would need a "real life" to avoid farmville.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[repapetilto]

check noscript

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Myopic]

Thanks for the link that was hilarious. +5, Funny.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Eraesr]

Well, the problem wasn't directly caused by Firefox. Their plugin crash protection has a timeout of 10 seconds. It waits 10 seconds for a response from the plugin. If it's not received within that timeout period, the plugin is killed. Apparently FarmVille took more than 10 seconds to load, sucking up all CPU cycles in the process, causing Firefox to think the plugin crashed and killing it. So the real problem here was a shitty implementation of FarmVille.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Fred_A]

Did you check to see if al0ha hadn't turned off the internet ?

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has a mother who says the "computer isn't working" every time there's a hiccup in our Internet connection, I tend to side more with the GP. Plus, there's a bigger difference between "turn [off] the light" and "turn off the Internet" than you're letting on. The "light" can be the intangible energy source that illuminates the room, but more colloquially it can mean a "light bulb" that, in fact, is being turned off (i.e., not having power routed through it). The Internet is what it is. There is no accepted colloquialism that equates the Internet to the modem that grants you access to it.

As for Farmville, is it really that bad? I mean, I know it's a Facebook app and I avoid that site like the plague, but I also enjoyed Harvest Moon when its first installment came out over a decade ago (and I enjoy some of the newer installments as well). Is there a difference between the two in terms of gameplay?

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[mujadaddy]

So the real problem here was a shitty implementation of FarmVille.

Well, I, for one, am shocked.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[GravityStar]

Apparently the plugin protection was waiting for a response from the plugin, while the plugin protection's request hadn't even been sent because farmville was overloading the plugin's event loop.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Thinboy00]

I've heard perfectly intelligent people say "my internet went out". Obviously they are referring to the router/modem/whatnot.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[Kalriath]

Oooooorrr, they're referring to the connection. I think it's perfectly appropriate to say "my internet's out" when the connection fails - it's close enough to the truth.

Re:Need for more varied beta testers

[YourExperiment]

Yeah, they should pay my wife to do it, she's a perfect candidate. One time she asked me if I had, "Turned off the Internet."

And had you? I remember having some problems with it a few weeks back, I wondered whose fault that was.

So much for the idea....

[HerculesMO]

That Firefox users were smarter internet users.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Tei]

The farmville players can be intelligent people, but for gaming have a simplictic blurry oriented option, that the gamers need to understand and respect.

And the devs make the right decision fixing a bug that affect a lot of users.

Re:So much for the idea....

[DIplomatic]

That Firefox users were smarter internet users.

No, see a couple of years ago the smarter internet users started installing Firefox for their computer-illiterate friends and family to get them away from IE.
THOSE are the type of people that play FarmVille.

Re:So much for the idea....

[hairyfeet]

Actually those of use that recommend FF are more sophisticated, but those we recommend it to may not be. Plus you have to realize Farmville is like catnip to females. Don't ask me why, but I haven't seen a game so many females play since the original Age of Empires. Even my GF who frankly thinks games are a waste of time ended up hooked on Farmville and that treasure hunting game they have on FB.

So like many other times in life we simply have to put up with it because the females love it, kinda like those God Awful "relationship" movies, AKA chick flicks. Why we can't teach the female population the artistic merits of big guns, huge explosions, and tons of CGI? It is a riddle for the ages my friend, a riddle for the ages.

Re:So much for the idea....

[PopeRatzo]

The farmville players can be intelligent people

Citation needed.

Re:So much for the idea....

[morari]

Even my GF who frankly thinks games are a waste of time ended up hooked on Farmville and that treasure hunting game they have on FB.

She thinks that games are a waste of time, but makes an exception for Farmville of all things?!

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

We could but we don't. Stupid women like bad chick flicks because we teach stupid girls to play with Barbies, while we teach stupid boys to play with you guns , which results in the liking bad action movies. Sexist stereotypes are true.... because we make them true. The only reason there are exceptions is because not all children are stupid.

Re:So much for the idea....

[PIBM]

a bug ? Wasn't it simply an overzealous protection ? Which is viewed as fine by also a lot of users anyway, who don't want flash / adobe reader to waste their cpu cycles ?

Re:So much for the idea....

[icebraining]

Don't ask me why, but I haven't seen a game so many females play since the original Age of Empires.

You may not have seen it, but Sims was both the best selling game at the time, and the only to reach a 1:1 ratio in on female:male.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody needs to respect their opinions, just as nobody needs to respect yours, or mine.

Re:So much for the idea....

[hairyfeet]

Yep, she says after a hard day of selling vacation packages (if you fill out the card at one of those booths to win a Mini Cooper, and a nice gal with a southern drawl calls to ask if you would like a vacation to Branson BE NICE, it is just her job) planting veggies for a couple of hours relaxes her. I even gave her one of my old spares so when/if something goes wrong with hers she can use the spare until she can come down for the weekend so I can fix her main rig.

I can't really bitch about those social sites though, as I met my sweetie on one. I got tired of all the drama queens I was meeting locally so a friend talked me into trying Tagged, and after about a month of swing and a miss I met my baby, and we have been together nearly two years now. She lives about 250 miles round trip, so she comes down one weekend and I go up the next. No jealousy, no cheating, no drama. She is like a breath of fresh air compared to the nutjobs I usually end up with.

So if the worst I have to deal with is her needing to play her FB games several times a week I can live with that. I replaced her mobo with one from an old gaming rig I had lying around, loaded it and the old spare with RAM and a couple of old Geforce cards, and she is a happy little camper. I have found with those FB games there is no such thing as too much RAM, and a discrete GPU really helps. I put a 6xxx series with 512Mb of RAM in the old spare and even though it is just a 733MHz SFF I had left from an office upgrade she says it works great for FB. Of course I used Nlite to strip XP down and make it strictly an Internet box, so that may be part of the reason why it works well.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

just cuz we use ie don't not mean were idiots
go shut up man farm vile is cool

- ssj4gotenks69 . aol.com

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suggest also to look into spore, even if I've not evidence for claiming that it's a girlie game.

but girls can be educated. my mom is a computer illiterate, played all kind of mission of caesar III, ramped up all the micromanagement way to patrician III and settled down to strategy games. she's now complaining that all the total wars after rome are too much easy, even with the ugly cheating they do to masquerade the lame ai

she would play europe universalis but the interface sucks too much, and she's too slow to enjoy rts. I've tried to hand her civ 3, but that was beaten in a week and labelled illogical and contrived (which it's a valid point)

I've yet to submit her civ4.... but girls that don't like girlie games exists.
and my girlfriend is a rpg addicted. insists on playing again and again old black isle titles, but doesn't have the attention span to play with something more complex like morriwind (open world confuses her, she wants to have a goal and play a tunnel like story as in fable with a clear direction and enemy at all the time)

Re:So much for the idea....

[AmberBlackCat]

And those are the types who could have played uninterrupted if it wasn't for Firefox.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know there were that many effeminate men.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

me too

Re:So much for the idea....

[The Unusual Suspect]

If all you have is Bugzilla, everything looks like a bug.

Re:So much for the idea....

[westlake]

No, see a couple of years ago the smarter internet users started installing Firefox for their computer-illiterate friends and family to get them away from IE.
THOSE are the type of people that play FarmVille.

There are about a billion PC users - 900 million or so running Windows.

But only a million Slashdot geeks.

For the alternative browser to maintain traction, the momentum has to come from ordinary users, not the evangelist with his forced conversions.

The evangelist doesn't have that many friends, he meets resistance, he hits a wall, he stalls out.

Re:So much for the idea....

[TyIzaeL]

With just about any DX10 GPU, she could have GPU-accelerated flash. Firefox wouldn't have needed the Farmville tweak on her machine.

Re:So much for the idea....

[dov_0]

That Firefox users were smarter internet users.

Whoever thought that? It's been years since use of Firefox was by a fairly select group of the tech savvy. Didn't you notice it going mainstream?

Re:So much for the idea....

[Johann Lau]

smarter, maybe... but the smart ones use Opera. :>

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

Johann, watch the spelling: it's 'smug'-

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains why the devs decided to remove the properties menu?

Re:So much for the idea....

[TheRaven64]

I find that hard to believe. Are you seriously telling me that there are men who play The Sims? Even the expansion packs and the sequels?

Re:So much for the idea....

[baka_toroi]

I love happy endings! *cries*

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why we can't teach the female population the artistic merits of big guns, huge explosions, and tons of CGI? It is a riddle for the ages my friend, a riddle for the ages.

There's no explication. We have to live with the fact that "Sex and the City" is to women what "24" is to men...

Re:So much for the idea....

[Johann Lau]

smartness and smugness go hand in hand, and for good reason... don't pout, download opera today!

Re:So much for the idea....

[Hurricane78]

And so much for the idea that the Firefox developers had a spine.

Appeal to the dumbest part of the Gaussian distribution curve of your users, at the cost of the rest... I thought that was a disease of for-profit companies, and especially Microsoft (Proof: Clippy).

Re:So much for the idea....

[Skuld-Chan]

I used to have a hard time justifying my World of Warcraft addiction. Then it hit me - at least in WoW you see other players and can compete with them - regularly. Farmville it seems like people are literally just farming for their own amusement (you can visit other farms, but in the students I've observed play it - they never do), and it requires more attention than World of Warcraft. If you don't log in daily your stuff dies.

My Shaman on the other hand is probably still sitting there in Dalaran in her lovely tier 7 gear.

Re:So much for the idea....

[elrous0]

They love The Sims and Second Life too. "The Sims" is the female equivalent of the Halo, Half-Life, and Call of Duty franchises all combined together.

Re:So much for the idea....

[elrous0]

No, they're true because women and men are physically different and have different hormonal make-ups. You pump a woman full of enough testosterone and she would probably love Call of Duty. You cut a guy's balls off and pump him full of estrogen, and he'll probably want to go shopping. Society may give aggressive and empathic behavior a certain context, but the differences have a very real physical underpinning. I know because I had a sister who thought the same as you do--until she had kids. She tried teaching her boys to play with dolls--instead they made guns out of sticks and played war behind her back.

Re:So much for the idea....

[men0s]

Yep, she says after a hard day of selling vacation packages (if you fill out the card at one of those booths to win a Mini Cooper, and a nice gal with a southern drawl calls to ask if you would like a vacation to Branson BE NICE, it is just her job)

Of course I'm nice to solicitors (especially if they have a Southern or Yooper/Wisconsinite accent) and all but why would anyone want to vacation in Branson, MO?

Re:So much for the idea....

[lowrydr310]

Let me be the first to say I LOVE MY WIFE.

She has some friends who are addicted to FarmVille and other facebook games. She thought it was a complete waste of time (as is using facebook) and was getting so many game requests she decided to deactivate her account, and hasn't looked back.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Overzeetop]

Mine almost deactivated her FB account because she felt addicted to it. Part of it was that my daughter liked to play, but is too young for FB, so my wife let her play with her account, and then ended up "helping" all the time.

Luckily she canned all the games (afaik) and stayed on FB, but she definitely has some issues with the socially immersive site.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife stopped playing Facebook games (thank FSM) after her brother got her hooked on WoW. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement... now instead of logging in twice a day to farm, she logs in each day to make her epic gem.

At least we get to Level/Raid together now.

Re:So much for the idea....

[mujadaddy]

You cut a guy's balls off and pump him full of estrogen, and he'll probably want to go shopping.

This is a courtesy notification that I am unsubscribing from your newsletter.

Re:So much for the idea....

[mujadaddy]

smarter, maybe... but the smart one uses Opera. :>

FTFY

Re:So much for the idea....

[CastrTroy]

Not really much different from animal crossing. You basically just fish, look for fossils, plant trees and such, and all within your own little world. You can visit other towns, but it's not something that's necessary, or even advantageous in the game. Sure you can visit other towns to get other fruits, but if you wait long enough, you'll get one from another resident of your town anyway, so there's almost no incentive to visit other towns. Also, if you don't play daily, you get roaches in your house and the grass starts to get lots of weeds, plus the other residents of the town start asking where you have been.

Re:So much for the idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but only to remove the pool stairs while they swim, or delete the door in a fire.

Ahh the inocence....

Re:So much for the idea....

[Dashiva Dan]

How is this "at the cost of the rest"? Please cite.

Re:So much for the idea....

[hairyfeet]

You're kidding, right? Huuuuge music mecca, with tons of shows, world class golf course, Silver Dollar City amusement park, great shopping and antiquing, and because it is here in the south your dollar goes a LOT farther than it does on the coasts!

If you haven't ever been it is a real treat and very affordable. What you would spend on a couple of days on the coast you can get a week down here and actually come back with souvenirs!

Re:So much for the idea....

[hairyfeet]

Thanks. I have to say I always said those social dating sites were the stupidest damn thing I ever heard of...until I actually tried it. Fixing PCs by day and playing bass guitar at night the only girls I would meet ended up being drama queens, or drunks/druggies, or had more baggage than LAX. I got lots of hate sex (for those non musicians "hate sex" is when a girl decides to "get even" with her BF for real/imagined cheating, and they like out of town musicians because we won't travel in their social circles or show up at their work/home) but in the end I still woke up alone, and I sure as hell wouldn't bring them home to meet the fam.

Then a customer who is a long haul trucker talked me into trying Tagged. Like me he had trouble meeting nice gals, and after 6 months he ended up with a great gal that is even riding the road with him and learning to drive herself so they can retire early to some nice tropical place. After a few months online I met my sweetie, and after talking by email and phone for nearly a year (we have both been cheated on in the past and wanted to take things slow) we met IRL and have been together nearly 2 years now.

So if you have any friends/family that haven't been having any luck in the dating scene I would suggest you point them towards Tagged and have them give it a shot. Unlike many of them that seemed to be filled with jailbait and scammers Tagged seems to mainly have 30-50 year old women that just want to be treated with respect and decency. Believe me it was like a breath of fresh air to go from a relationship where the gal could drain my wallet faster than a hole in my pocket to a sweet gal that would rather stand by my stove in her nightie and cook a meal than go to a restaurant because it feels "more homey" to her. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I can thanks a stupid Internet dating site for that. Well at least I can still hate FB.

Re:So much for the idea....

[men0s]

You're kidding, right? Huuuuge music mecca, with tons of shows, world class golf course, Silver Dollar City amusement park, great shopping and antiquing, and because it is here in the south your dollar goes a LOT farther than it does on the coasts!

You pretty much described, point-for-point, south-eastern Michigan (sans amusement park). But if you want that you can always head to Sandusky, OH. =)

Oblig...

[snowraver1]

people playing FarmVille on Facebook complained that their browser was shutting down the game.

"It's a *Feature*.

Re:Oblig...

[Linker3000]

They are obviously resting one of their palms on the left front edge of the keyboard and hosing their signal. Did they not see the memo?

Re:Oblig...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry Dave, allowing you to play Farmville would be unproductive."

Re:Oblig...

[jedidiah]

Firefox has fits with Zynga games in general. I'm not sure how much of
it is due to the stock configuration and how much of it is due to my
extra paranoid addons. However, Firefox quite often complains about
various security problems with Zynga games.

This doesn't surprise me in the least.

Re:Oblig...

[Mr. Freeman]

"Firefox quite often complains about various security problems with Zynga games"

That's because zynga games are quite often malware in disguise. It's probably something to do with zynga's sloppy coding combined with the fact that their applications all try to push their advertising crap onto your machine in a covert way. Firefox is working as intended.

I realize that you aren't complaining here, but your post almost reads like "My antivirus keeps trying to delete all these viruses I downloaded".

Re:Oblig...

[Hurricane78]

I wish there was an antivirus that would delete the gaping hole that sits between the keyboard and the chair. And I don’t mean that in a Goatse kind of way.

Re:Oblig...

[drinkypoo]

Zynga is shit at Javascript. So is facebook. Add in Flash and you have a total clusterfuck. My addiction to those games wore off some months ago and it's amazing how many less browser problems I'm having. I know, correlation, causation, etc etc.

farmvill players are like sarah palin endorsements

[bsDaemon]

if they're needed to win, I don't mind losing. But that's why I'm not in business. Or politics.

Technology outcome

[bonch]

Behold, decades of networking research and painstaking software development has brought us to this moment--watering tomatoes on a website.

Re:Technology outcome

[Securityemo]

And that's not going to change until you start wiring stuff into/altering people's brains.

Re:Technology outcome

[blair1q]

It's that, or "watering" your own keyboard because of the things you see on a website...

Re:Technology outcome

[Trepidity]

As someone who spent quite a bit of time tending a virtual lemonade stand on an Apple ][, I'd have to say this isn't a new trend!

Re:Technology outcome

[eastlight_jim]

I assume that you've seen the Farmville parody video that's been circulating for a while. Definitely worth checking out if you've got a couple of spare minutes. Had me in stitches.

Re:Technology outcome

[Abcd1234]

Because I'm sure the games you like to play are *far* deeper.

On the bright side, technology today gives snobs the opportunity to bitch to the world about the use of said technology...

Re:Technology outcome

[Anonymous Coward]

I think if we brought on a utopian End of History scenario where wars stopped, nobody fought, everyone had plenty, and work was easy; the majority of people would still choose to water virtual plants, watch sports, drink, and masturbate rather than write great novels or paint or compose.

Could it be any other way?

Re:Technology outcome

[Nimey]

Did you play the version Apple distributed with their computers? I loved that game back when, and it was actually educational.

Re:Technology outcome

[antdude]

Play some more here. ;)

Re:Technology outcome

[wiredlogic]

That reminds me of another Apple ][ text game where you had to sell tickets for the school play and you could allocate your funds in different ways to help sell more tickets. One day I found out that you could order negative quantities of supplies and your account would be credited rather than debited. You could make millions without selling any tickets at all :)

Re:Technology outcome

[Hamsterdan]

wow... thanks for the memories, I remeber playing that game as a kid.

Re:Technology outcome

[Qubit]

Behold, decades of networking research and painstaking software development has brought us to this moment--watering tomatoes on a website.

And that's not going to change until you start wiring stuff into/altering people's brains.

Luster Leaf Rapiclip Foam Wire Tie. If it's great for tender tomatoes, I'm sure it'll work quite well for soft brains as well.

Re:Technology outcome

[bonch]

The games I play are definitely deeper than FarmVille.

Re:Technology outcome

[L4t3r4lu5]

I'm pretty sure I got into trouble in college for doing something similar

Re:Technology outcome

[Abcd1234]

Let me guess, you hunt people down with a virtual sniper rifle? No, wait, you slash monsters with your sword in your WoW clan?

It was more than just Farmville.

[techvet]

Flash pages on ESPN web sites were also timing out with "Please submit a crash report" message. I'll give credit to Mozilla for humping out a fix in a hurry.

Re:It was more than just Farmville.

[drinkypoo]

A hurry? This problem has been going on forever.

Why is the time fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does it terminate the plugin after a fixed number of seconds of unresponsiveness? It would be far more robust to have it default to some value, and the user themselves would be able to adjust the duration as desired in the application settings than arbitrarily choose a time that the end user will just have to live with.

Re:Why is the time fixed?

[josath]

You can adjust the time, but it's in an obscure about:config setting, like many of Firefox's advanced settings.

I think terminating the plugin automatically is the wrong choice. If JavaScript takes too long, they don't terminate it, but instead ask the user if they want to keep running or terminate. One has to wonder why they give more leeway to applications written in JavaScript than applications written in ActionScript, seeing as how either one is just as capable of hanging your browser.

Notably, Chrome gives you the same popup dialog for both JS applications and plugins. My guess is Firefox devs are more anti-Flash, and don't mind killing it, and only relented when they realized how many of their userbase they might lose when they start interfering with people's Farmville addictions.

Re:Why is the time fixed?

[sjames]

Or just ask on a per-instance basis. "plugin not responding, kill it or wait longer?"

Re:Why is the time fixed?

[DrXym]

Why does it terminate the plugin after a fixed number of seconds of unresponsiveness? It would be far more robust to have it default to some value, and the user themselves would be able to adjust the duration as desired in the application settings than arbitrarily choose a time that the end user will just have to live with.

It picks some arbitrary value because the browser is not psychic. It can't tell the difference between a plugin which is dead and one which is unresponsive. So it picks some reasonable value and assumes that once the plugin passes over that line that its dead. Unfortunately things like low memory, swap, CPU consumption elsewhere could mean the plugin takes longer to respond than normal and gets clobbered.

Funnily enough Firefox finds itself in the same pickle that OLE2 used to have on Windows. In OLE2 you can embed an object running from one process into a window of another process. Works well enough except for times when the object server goes dead and the host is trying to do a window resize or whatnot. The host can't resize because commands to the object are timing out. MFC used to install a message filter for this situation which kicked in too fast when the embedded object became unresponsive leading to a meaningless Cancel / Retry message appearing. Firefox has discovered its own version of the same issue.

Re:Why is the time fixed?

[wbo]

A more interesting question is why Firefox thinks Farmville is unresponsive in the first place. A few people I work with play Farmville on a regular basis and Farmville displays a progress bar that is updated constantly while it is loading. Yet for some reason Firefox still thinks that it is unresponsive even though it is updating the screen!

I assume Firefox must be expecting the plugin to respond to a particular message and assuming is is unresponsive if it doesn't respond even though the plugin may still be updating it's display area.

Also affects Flash developers

[josath]

The other annoying thing about this "hung plugin detector"? It counts a Flash plugin paused for debugging (so you can look at the call stack, step through code, etc) as hung. For weeks I've been cursing Flash for always crashing in Firefox, because when Firefox kills the plugin, it displays the same generic message as if the plugin has actually crashed. Only recently did I find out that Firefox is the real cause of my pain, not Adobe!

I wish they had done it like Chrome, or like Firefox already does with JS, where instead it pops up a little dialog telling you that the plugin is unresponsive, and would you like to kill it? Seems very suspicious, I wonder if there's someone at Mozilla with an anti-Flash agenda that wants to make Flash look more unstable than it really is?

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[coplate]

How bout the 'dom.ipc.plugins' entries in the about:config page

That's what they are there for.

I didn't even have to google for this, I just went to about:config, searched for plugin, and BAM.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Only recently did I find out that Firefox is the real cause of my pain, not Adobe!

No, I'd say the pain of you having to write Flash is probably a lot more due to Adobe than it is due to Firefox...

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[josath]

See, the problem was I didn't even suspect Firefox was the cause, since Firefox itself was telling me Flash was crashing. Why would I search for a fix in Firefox, when I believe Firefox is not the problem?

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Lunix Nutcase]

So instead of having a simple dialog box one has to wade through the about:config for an obscure setting? Really?

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[josath]

It's not crap :(

Some types of complex applications are just not possible in HTML5, and even if they were, wouldn't be available to 50%+ of our users (eg people using IE). So the only solution if we want to get our product to market today, is to use Flash. Believe me, I hate Flash ad banners and crappy Flash navigation websites as much as the next guy. But when you're doing an advance online collaboration application, your only choices are pretty much Java, Silverlight, or Flash. And for various reasons, Flash sucks the least out of all three of them.

When HTML5 is sufficient and has the marketshare to do what we want, I'll be right up there with RMS trying to port my apps to it, but it's just not the reality today.


tl;dr; sorry for feeding the trolls.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[pavon]

It was a suggestion to a developer. Developers shouldn't have a problem editing about:config to put the browser in flash-debug mode.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll you, but aren't services like Google Wave written without Flash, just loads of Javascript? Do you have an aesthetic aversion to that kind of sprawl?

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[tepples]

aren't services like Google Wave written without Flash, just loads of Javascript?

What is the counterpart to HTML5 <canvas>, HTML5 local storage, HTML5 page manifests, HTML5 new <input type=> values, etc. in Internet Explorer 7 and 8? And in JavaScript, how do you ask the user's permission to turn on the computer's webcam (if present) and then send the video stream to the server?

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Lunix Nutcase]

Developers shouldn't have a problem editing about:config to put the browser in flash-debug mode.

Implying that being a developer means you know every single option in about:config. Sure, once the setting is pointed out then yes it shouldn't be a problem to edit it. The issue is that it's almost impossible to know all the options and what they do within about:config.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[ThePengwin]

I delved into the development of flash once. Some things i know it can do over HTML5 are:

- Webcam/Microphone Integration
- Sockets (I believe a lot of games by Zynga maintain a constant connection to a server)
- Better handling of sound (On events, sound can be manipulated)

Also, Flash is a pretty Locked in environment. HTML 5 is still not widely supported in the aspects a game developer would need to make a robust and polished web game. Flash is made by one company and they are the overlords who control its development cycle. Its not a committee decision to add features.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Kelson]

aren't services like Google Wave written without Flash, just loads of Javascript?

Google Wave also relies on a lot of HTML5 features which aren't available in IE7 or IE8 (never mind IE6). The only reason that Wave appears to run in IE is that Google came up with a way to embed Chrome in the IE window. That means getting the end-user to install another add-in.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[ruewan]

I actually had to switch to chrome because my wife plays Farmville and it was constantly bringing the computer to a halt in Firefox/IE. It works well in chrome though. I was thinking that it was a flash issue until I tried chrome.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Anonymous Coward]

aren't services like Google Wave written without Flash, just loads of Javascript?

What is the counterpart to HTML5 <canvas>, HTML5 local storage, HTML5 page manifests, HTML5 new <input type=> values, etc. in Internet Explorer 7 and 8? And in JavaScript, how do you ask the user's permission to turn on the computer's webcam (if present) and then send the video stream to the server?

The alternative is either going without, writing a desktop application, or (reliance on) browser plugins. Trying to hack in desktop behavior by resorting to Flash is the worst choice available.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[slaingod]

Yea thats why I always use IE or Safari for debugging, depending on my OS. I hate having my browser hung when I need to look up a bug online, etc.

IE has its own problems though with Flash debugging. You have to remember to always close the pp from the browser window and not terminate it with Flex Builder, or it orphans the process because of the whole ieuser.exe sandboxing thing.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[slaingod]

A lot of it comes down to resources. In general, it is just quicker to develop using the Adobe stuff and get a product out the door. Most people forget that Actionscript 3 is javascript essentially. If you ignore typing (disable the warnings), you can pretty much copy pure js code directly over.

MXML is obviously somewhat different than HTML, but in my mind at least, it is more rational, since it wasn't designed by committee. Like you set something hidden, you just do 'visible="false"'. You don't have to mess with the style in the same way. And I LOVE bind variables in a scripting language. Having the runtime handle all of the updating for you automatically is such a time saver. Using visible="{xmlUser.lastResult.user}" to show hide UI elements if the user is logged in, etc.

When HTML5 has some cool unified dev tools (man, debugging in Flex Builder is so much nicer than say Firebug to me), 95% market penetration, and the 3rd party libraries have shaken out (like jQuery has to some extent),
and you don't have to test your shit on every single browser just to make sure it didn't break, and the performance starts nearing Flash some more...and all of that can happen while Flash/Actionscript stands still and doesn't add any new features...then I will be on board with HTML5 as the Flash killer :P

* There are the occasional browser incompatibilities in Flash that drive me batshit: Having a problem where some, not all, Firefox installs only on OSX have mouse coordinate issues when dragging. And overall if Macromedia (and now Adobe) has done a better job on OSX/Linux support there would be a lot less bitching.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Anonymous Coward]

wants to make Flash look more unstable than it really is?

Not possible. Move along.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Mozilla architecture, the browser was waiting for Flash to respond because their UI is all single threaded. That is, you can't interact with the browser - including any popups asking you to kill Flash - while it's waiting for Flash.

Not exactly the smartest thing to be doing...

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[TheRaven64]

- Webcam/Microphone Integration

I believe this is correct. I don't really like the idea of Flash having access to these either, given its security track record. I'd rather run a specific app if I want to provide access to my microphone and webcam than have an app that visits potentially hostile sites expose access to them.

Sockets

Check the WebSocket section of the HTML5 spec. It permits persistent connections to the server, with pushes from both ends.

Better handling of sound (On events, sound can be manipulated)

There's a Mozilla extension for doing sound processing. Without that, you can load sounds using the audio tag and control playback / volume for each one from JavaScript. This is enough for most games, although not enough for all kinds of application.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[xouumalperxe]

Seems very suspicious, I wonder if there's someone at Mozilla with an anti-Flash agenda that wants to make Flash look more unstable than it really is?

Option 1: The plugin crash protection implementation didn't correctly account for debugging plugins. Option 2: Someone at Mozilla holds a grudge and is willing to screw around with Firefox itself to make Adobe/Flash look bad. Yeah, I agree. Option 2 is far more likely.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[Ant P.]

Implying that being a developer means you know every single option in about:config

Implying that Flash developers lack the requisite brain cells to look it up on a search engine.

You might be on to something there.

Re:Also affects Flash developers

[josath]

Yeah seems silly. They went to all the trouble of running plugins in a separate process, but it's still single threaded somehow? I don't get it.

So farmville suddenly became a priority huh? :)

[Superken7]

Now we know what the mozilla guys are doing while their code is compiling... harvesting crops!

Re:So farmville suddenly became a priority huh? :)

[MozeeToby]

Actually we know the opposite, that none of the FF developers play Farmville. If they did the problem never would have made it into the wild.

Re:So farmville suddenly became a priority huh? :)

[Maarx]

Actually we know the opposite, that none of the FF developers play Farmville. If they did the problem never would have made it into the wild.

I'd love to know if any / how many Mozilla developers knew about this flaw but didn't report / submit it because that would involve admitting to playing Farmville (perhaps while at work).

Re:So farmville suddenly became a priority huh? :)

[JumpDrive]

So now we know what the developers at MS were doing when they developed IE7 and 8

Re:So farmville suddenly became a priority huh? :)

[zippthorne]

Actually we know the opposite, that none of the FF developers play Farmville. If they did the problem never would have made it into the wild.

Then again, neither would the update....

No Bug, Artificial Intelligence at work.

[rockhopjohn]

I don't think that was a bug, looks like more of a sign of AI on the browser's part.

Re:No Bug, Artificial Intelligence at work.

[PerfectionLost]

It stalls for 45 seconds because an AI is playing farmville over a distributed network of Firefox users.

What is the root cause of the 10+ second hang?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know why said app is allowed to hang the browser for so long legitimately? (How is this even possible?) Just curious (web programming is not my thing.)

Re:What is the root cause of the 10+ second hang?

[josath]

It's some combination of:
1. Having a slow PC
2. Other apps in background using up CPU
3. single-threaded execution -- which means that as long as a single chunk of code in a Flash / Ajax app is running, it can't report back to the browser to let the browser update itself and do other things, making it appear hung.

Means that for some complex chunk of code, say the initialization routines of a game, might take up to 10 seconds to finish. People don't care as much about waiting 10 seconds for a game to load, heck for desktop, non-web, games, people often wait much longer for a game to load.

What's interesting is that you can hang the browser from either Javascript (aka Ajax) or from within a plugin (like Flash or Java). But in the case of Ajax, the browser will first ask you if you want to terminate, or continue running, but it doesn't give the same choice to code running in a plugin.

Re:What is the root cause of the 10+ second hang?

[Anonymous Coward]

Means that for some complex chunk of code, say the initialization routines of a game, might take up to 10 seconds to finish. People don't care as much about waiting 10 seconds for a game to load, heck for desktop, non-web, games, people often wait much longer for a game to load.

Or 10 seconds for the menu to load while in game. I'm pointing at you, DICE.

Re:What is the root cause of the 10+ second hang?

[Man Eating Duck]

3. single-threaded execution -- which means that as long as a single chunk of code in a Flash / Ajax app is running, it can't report back to the browser to let the browser update itself and do other things, making it appear hung.

I believe the reason why it appears that way is that the browser really DOES freeze and become unresponsive, no matter what the cause :)

I know about the technical difficulties with making Firefox multithreaded, but it's a fairly big issue for the perception of speed. Chrome doesn't have this problem at all, I've used both browsers extensively. IME Firefox feels slow more due to the constant minuscule (0.5 sec) pauses than because of the few seconds of freezing every now and then.

I love Firefox and use it a lot, mainly due to the availability of numerous excellent plugins, but sometimes it is a relief to fire up Chrome after having used Firefox for a period of time. BTW, both my gaming rig at home and my desktop at work has plenty of processing power and memory, resource starvation is not the issue.

Re:What is the root cause of the 10+ second hang?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. So basically, the root issue is that the browser's UI render thread is shared with script execution.

captcha: reformed

Re:What is the root cause of the 10+ second hang?

[TheRaven64]

Not quite. The real problem is that the old NetScape plugin API was not really designed for interactive plugins. It was designed as a replacement for the helper app mechanism, where a link would open in a designated external app, and allowed you to do some extra stuff like embed unsupported types directly into a page. It was designed to run on machines like the 16MHz 386 running Windows 3.11 that I was using at the time that it was introduced.

This meant that it couldn't use multiple threads (the host OS didn't support them), and it had a purely synchronous API for communicating with the browser. The browser periodically calls into the plugin and the plugin calls back to the browser for drawing.

With WebKit or nspluginwrapper, there are now some horrible hacks to work around this API. The plugin runs in a separate thread or process and calls a stub version of the browser's rendering API, which renders to a separate image. This is then composited into the browser.

The downside of this approach is that it involves a lot more overhead. The up side is that it takes advantage of multicore machines and makes it harder for the plugin to break the browser.

Don't Hit Me!

[cusco]

Oh, by the gods I hope this works. My wife has come close to throwing her nice, fairly-new laptop against the wall for the last several days. EverQuest fanatics don't hold a candle to Farmville players.

Re:Don't Hit Me!

[stimpleton]

He is right.

I used to work for a large Honda Dealership, assigning loan cars for people while theirs is serviced. While their car is bought around from parking I learned that some played Farmville. Others were in no mood for chat. I have seen grown(mainly women) scream like lunatics while they wait an extra 10 minutes till a car is sorted. One time when one didnt have cup holders, she threw the keys on the ground(complete with disabler alarm built in), and smashed them with her heel.

This is the farmville demographic.

Re:Don't Hit Me!

[TheLink]

The obsessive ones are the ones who'd _still_ be playing farmville over and over.

And the obsessive ones are the ones more likely to behave as you say.

Re:Don't Hit Me!

[caramuru]

Unless Carlin believes, er believed, in the ubiquity of the normal distribution, then his joke should read "Think about how stupid the median person is. Now, realize that half of them are dumber than that."

Ignore Those People For Any Length Of Time?

[boudie2]

I've been ignoring people who play Farmville since it came out. Perhaps the biggest waste of bandwidth on the Internet. That would be a good topic, what's the biggest bandwidth waster out there? Perhaps the entire Facebook "franchise"? Hope I haven't kept anyone away from their virtual cows (snicker...).

Re:Ignore Those People For Any Length Of Time?

[Anonymous Coward]

One pirate stealing a full blu-ray rip (20GB+?) probably uses as much bandwidth as thousands of FarmVille time wasters.

Re:Ignore Those People For Any Length Of Time?

[WorkerGnome]

I would bet that World of Warcraft has a significantly higher bandwidth requirement, and nearly as many users...

Re:Ignore Those People For Any Length Of Time?

[Killer Orca]

I've been ignoring people who play Farmville since it came out. Perhaps the biggest waste of bandwidth on the Internet. That would be a good topic, what's the biggest bandwidth waster out there? Perhaps the entire Facebook "franchise"? Hope I haven't kept anyone away from their virtual cows (snicker...).

Interesting question, the people play it certainly shouldn't see it as a bandwidth waste, maybe a time waster for sure but they probably aren't thinking in terms of resources. While I would like to give the award for biggest bandwidth waste to Facebook I will have to defer it to Ubisoft, for their new DRM scheme, that to me is even more of a waste.

Where was 3.6.5?

[DudemanX]

Why is this release numbered 3.6.6 and not 3.6.5(which is 0.0.1 more than the previous release)?

Re:Where was 3.6.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was eaten by a Grue.

Re:Where was 3.6.5?

[woddfellow2]

From http://christian.legnitto.com/blog/2010/06/09/heads-up-the-next-firefox-platform-version-is-1-9-2-6-instead-of-1-9-2-5/:

Firefox 3.6.4 [...] has a platform version of 1.9.2.4. The version number 1.9.2.5 is currently being used by Fennec. We’ll be taking fixes above and beyond that version, so the next platform version Firefox will use will be named 1.9.2.6. We will keep the version numbers coherent by naming it Firefox 3.6.6 (essentially skipping over 3.6.5).

Re:Where was 3.6.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christian Legnitto says: (From http://christian.legnitto.com/blog/2010/06/09/heads-up-the-next-firefox-platform-version-is-1-9-2-6-instead-of-1-9-2-5/)

Firefox 3.6.4 (get the release candidate!) has a platform version of 1.9.2.4. The version number 1.9.2.5 is currently being used by Fennec. We’ll be taking fixes above and beyond that version, so the next platform version Firefox will use will be named 1.9.2.6. We will keep the version numbers coherent by naming it Firefox 3.6.6 (essentially skipping over 3.6.5).

Re:Where was 3.6.5?

[Jesus_666]

Interestingly, 3.6.6 was also pushed to OS X users. I don't even know whether the crash protection applies to Mac users as we don't yet use the new-style plugin handling. In case it doesn't apply we get an update that does absolutely nothing beyond increasing an entirely decorative integer by 2.

This is a UI issues

[thoughtsatthemoment]

This is very similar to an application freezing on the Desktop. So Instead of killing the plugin, Firefox should provide UI for the user to decide what to do.

Also if the plugin died because it was killed for freezing, please don't say it crashed. That's very misleading.

Re:farmvill players are like sarah palin endorseme

[Lunix Nutcase]

Except that this wasn't just isolated to Farmville players.

Back to the stone age?

[Midnight Thunder]

Or more accurately: centuries of technological advances has brought us full cycle, except this time we are growing food we can't eat!?

Compatibility is a dangerous trap

[improfane]

This seems like a marketing decision to me, it's to protect the mindshare of Firefox in everyday people's minds.

Is it really Firefox's responsibility to hide bugs from users?

This sounds like Microsoft's perspective on compatibility*. If you ask me, it would have protected the user experience if Firefox did not update the crash detection. If a Flash application is sluggish and bringing the computer to a halt, it is poorly programmed. Making the slow to respond Flash plugin highly visible should force Zygna to fix the problem, increasing the web experience for all.

It's ridiculous case of a problem being overblown. In perspective, it's like a television manufacturer fixing the stream of a particular television channel because it is incorrect. Firefox should not be protecting third party website owners from their mistakes. Second they should not be protecting poorly coded third party plugins. That is why we have the crash protection to begin with! It's the same reason why too many content producers give up with standards because invalid code 'just works'. Where is the incentive to get things right?

The crash protection is like the halting problem but could be wrapped up into something reasonable to make the web easier to use. If your Flash is unresponsive for 30 seconds, I am going to get angry. Bye bye!

ActionScript programmers really have no clue what polling really means for performance.

*Microsoft contend with thousands of compatibility patches for third party applications that run on their platfor, written by people doing it wrong.. This is because people make mistakes and they want to protect their product. Unfortunately it increases complexity and keeps the industry in a methodological infancy -- bandaids rather than really learning from our mistakes.

Re:Compatibility is a dangerous trap

[josath]

In perspective, it's like a television manufacturer fixing the stream of a particular television channel because it is incorrect. Firefox should not be protecting third party website owners from their mistakes. Second they should not be protecting poorly coded third party plugins. That is why we have the crash protection to begin with! It's the same reason why too many content producers give up with standards because invalid code 'just works'. Where is the incentive to get things right?

Extending this reasoning, if any website takes too long to load, Firefox should simply close the tab, and tell the user that the website has crashed? I guess you're right, that would definitely put pressure on web developers to make sure their sites loaded fast enough to not get rejected by Firefox...but I think this heavy-handed approach is the wrong way to go about it. Pop up a dialog telling the user that XYZ is going too slow, the plugin is hanging, and would you like to kill it? This will let them know why their PC is going slow, but still giving them the choice to continue if they wish. I thought choice was the whole reason people like Firefox, Open Source, etc.

Flash games

[Maximus633]

While I was preparing the comment a well thought out comment I was reminded that my

Sorry I had to harvest some grapes. I don't want them to die!

Crap I almost forgot to milk the cows, feed my friends chickens,

Sorry... I had to go expand my farm so I can grow more corn. To hell with this comment. I will be in Farmville just send me a friend request...

what's FarmVille doing?

[fusiongyro]

I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my <1-year-old MacBook Pro. Does anybody know what exactly it's doing that's so CPU-intensive? The paranoid in me figured it was probably running some sort of password cracker in the background. Is faux 3D tile-based gaming really that expensive on a modern CPU? Is it doing a bunch of unnecessary communication with the server? Is it just really poorly written? That's my best guess. Anybody know what's the deal?

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[nurb432]

That is all part of the plan. It's co-developed by intel.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[JumpDrive]

Well , each tile is controlled by a web of finite elements and neural networks , which compute growth rates based on sun, temp, nutrition and water, to determine the growth rates and size of crops.

Or maybe its just flash with a visual basic plugin controller.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

This explains everything.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[smbarbour]

The problem is that you were using a MacBook Pro. Apple refuses to allow Adobe to write the Flash player properly for OSX, so an inferior product is a result.

It's funny how Apple purports itself to be an open platform while being exceedingly hostile towards developers. Even Microsoft gives away their compilers for free (including .NET). Apple requires you to pay for a development license to write for their platform. Palm (now HP) not only lets you choose to run unsigned code on WebOS, the SDK is freely available, AND you can modify the internal apps to suit your needs and desires.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Lehk228]

that was because you were running it on a toy computer. i have no problem running evony, which does similar 3D flash on a 1.6ghz pentium M machine running xubuntu

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[clarkn0va]

The problem is that you were using a MacBook Pro. Apple refuses to allow Adobe to write the Flash player properly for OSX, so an inferior product is a result.

Your argument makes a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that Adobe's flash performs as bad or worse on platforms that are demonstrably more open than Windows.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Even Microsoft gives away their compilers for free (including .NET). Apple requires you to pay for a development license to write for their platform. Palm (now HP) not only lets you choose to run unsigned code on WebOS, the SDK is freely available,

That's disingenuous. Apple gives away for free their compilers and SDK. You do not need to pay for a development license on the iPhone/iPod/iPad platform, but you do need to pay for a signing certificate so that your app can be tied to you. You will not be listed in the App Store without such a certificate. There is no such process for OS X, and development for OS X is 100% free.

There's a shitload wrong with Apple, but making stuff up simply hurts your points as it gives the fanbois a simply counterargument.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Blakey Rat]

I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my

I've never played Farmville, but most crappy Flash performance is Flash developers who poll for input (bad) instead of setting up callbacks (good).

I'd love to blame Adobe, but it's not really Flash's fault that people can write code like: "while(true){waitforinput();}" You can write that shitty code in almost every language.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Blakey Rat]

Wow, good job with that less-than sign, Slashdot. Well, you get the gist of the reply.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

lrn2quote, there is no green text here, 'tard.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[jo_ham]

Xcode is free. Developing for OS X is free. The Xcode compiler is GCC - that is free. You are talking here about Flash on OS X, not on iOS (where a development licence is $99). Microsoft's .NET is equivalent to XCode - both are free, both can be used for mobile development, but that costs money.

Other third party apps that use flash (XBMC iPlayer plugin being the one I use) on OS X seem to do just fine. On2's flash decoder tat allowed you to test the little embedded flash players it made worked very well (and you could feed it any swf). Microsoft Silverlight actually runs pretty well on my system (I use it for Sky Player) - it's markedly better than Flash at what it does. Are you saying that Apple are preferentially helping Microsoft with their proprietary system while "refusing" to allow Adobe to develop Flash? I call nonsense.

Apple's developer documentation clearly describes the low level frameworks in OS X that flash needs - things like the graphics system, for example are well described, including example code. Adobe likes to claim that "needed APIs" are "hidden" but this is clearly not the case - why is it only Adobe that is having this issue?

No, the real issue seems to be that Flash just plain sucks on anything that is not Windows because the code is poor. The 10.1 beta of Flash was *much much* better (and this was before hardware accelerated h.264) on OS X, so whatever they did between 10.0 and 10.1 (and the access to the internals of OS X remained totally unchanged during that time) they improved it enormously. It's still terrible, but it's at least more useable now.

Of course Adobe is going to blame Apple. Are they going to blame Linus for "refusing to allow them to write the flash player properly" in Linux? It's not like that code is private. Why does the Linux flash player suck so much compared to the Windows one if that is the case? The conclusion you will likely reach is that they don;t care enough about it to make it decent - a situation that was true on OS X until recently when Apple said "ok, no flash on the iPhone, it sucks" and Adobe realised they had better pull their thumb out and improve the Mac version. Marketing can explain away all the sudden performance gains in the newer versions as "Apple coming to their senses and helping us out by exposing needed APIs".

Apple has done nothing of the sort - they are already "exposed", and have been for a very long time.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[jo_ham]

I run Ubuntu on a Mac, does that still make it a toy? What exactly defines the toyness? The OS? The hardware?

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[fusiongyro]

The research which came out today showed that the difference in performance was on the order of 30%. I have played plenty of other Flash games that didn't have this problem. "Apple hates Adobe" or "Adobe hates Apple" are insufficient explanations for why what is essentially a Super Nintendo game in terms of complexity runs like ass on a platform that's at least three orders of magnitude faster.

You might not like Macs, but if Flash always ran like this, nobody would use it.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[fusiongyro]

It's common knowledge that the porn industry optimizes better than the rest of the tech industry.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[fusiongyro]

That's the best explanation I've heard. Thanks.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[fusiongyro]

Thanks. That actually helped a lot.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[TheRaven64]

As a concrete example:

Flash seems to do its own compositing. All 2D path rendering is done by the plugin. All images are composited in the plugin. None of this is delegated to the host platform. In contrast, other Mac apps use CoreGraphics (either directly or via AppKit) for 2D drawing, which offloads to the GPU where possible. All compositing is done via CoreAnimation, which lets you draw to a texture and then composites in the GPU.

When I write a Mac app that plays H.264 and wants to composite some other video over it, I use QuickTime to decode it to a CoreAnimation layer. If it's running on 10.6 with a recent GPU, QuickTime X will use the GPU, otherwise it will use the heavily optimised SSE / AltiVec implementation. I then draw into another CoreAnimation layer, and let the GPU composite the two together.

When Flash wants to play H.264 and draw stuff over the top, it decodes it in software with a horribly unoptimised (uses about twice as much CPU as FFMPEG) H.264 decoder. The decoded frames are then stored in a buffer in main memory. It then uses the CPU to draw things into another buffer, and then composites them together on the CPU.

The end result is that my code does almost everything on the GPU, where possible, while Adobe's does everything on the CPU. The other result is that my code is much less complex than Adobe's (for achieving same thing), making it easier to maintain and less likely to contain exploitable bugs.

Marketing can explain away all the sudden performance gains in the newer versions as "Apple coming to their senses and helping us out by exposing needed APIs".

Well, it's a bit of both. With one of the 10.6 updates, Apple added some APIs to allow Flash to access the hardware H.264 decoder on the newer Macs that have this functionality in the GPU. This means that Flash can use its own crappy software decoder on most Macs, but nVidia's decoder on a few, which makes it a lot faster on those platforms.

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[smbarbour]

Xcode is free. Developing for OS X is free. The Xcode compiler is GCC - that is free. You are talking here about Flash on OS X, not on iOS (where a development licence is $99). Microsoft's .NET is equivalent to XCode - both are free, both can be used for mobile development, but that costs money.

I'll concede that Xcode is free, but developing for Windows Mobile devices does not require you to pay anything (It's just easier to do if you buy Visual Studio)

Of course Adobe is going to blame Apple. Are they going to blame Linus for "refusing to allow them to write the flash player properly" in Linux? It's not like that code is private. Why does the Linux flash player suck so much compared to the Windows one if that is the case?

This is amusing. I use both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 10.4), and I find that Flash runs 10x BETTER on Linux than it does on Windows. On Windows, if you right-click in a flash player, the whole browser locks up. In Linux, there is no issue (and it runs faster).

Re:what's FarmVille doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry dude, you're either terribly confused, your machines are badly misconfigured, you're just making shit up, or you don't know what you're talking about. On the same platform, the same Flash video will consume more resources on Linux that it will on Windows. This is plain fact, as clear as day, easily confirmable on every site that's ever done a comparo.

Personal experience, I've been trying to put together a decent kitchen computer for my mother from old parts. There is no way to run full screen 480 Flash video on a Pentium Mobile 1.6 with an Intel GMA in Linux without chop. I started with the major consumer distros and eventually scaled down. Even with the lightest weight distros, #! or optimized Gentoo, it ain't possible. Oddly enough, same machine will run HD Flash just fine in XP or even Win7 without Aero.

Shit, my Sempron 3300+ with a 7600 GS can't run full screen HD Flash without skipping. Same machine in Windows easily handles.

And never mind the Compiz and Flash issues.

I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[__aapopf3474]

I saw this great art car once, it had an immense amount of detail and was huge. There was not much clear space on it except in an area about 6"x8" that had a sign in the middle that said, "I made this while you were watching TV." I've been thinking of updating the saying to "I made this while you were $^&*ing with FarmVille". FWIW, I built a Snail art car instead of watching TV of frobbing with Farmville. Now, if I could only get away from Slashdot . . .

See also this Good Samaritan Cartoon:
Guy in street, prone man at his feet:
"Oh, Great, as if I have the time or inclination to help a dying homeless man"
Same guy in front of computer:
" What's this?!! Sally needs a bag of fertilizer for her FarmVille Farm? I better get right on it."

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Vegeta99]

Awesome car.

I'd be out doing the same thing instead of watching television IF my car hobby would become as affordable as $60 a month and a grand or so every 10 years when a TV releases the magic smoke. Until then, boob toob it is.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, it must be nice up there on that pedestal. Let us know when we can join you.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[PeanutButterBreath]

Let us know when we can join you.

Right after you turn off the TV, presumably.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Kaboom13]

So instead of playing harmless games like Farmville, or watching TV to relax, we should be making the latest and greatest burning-man rejects? No thanks. Playing Farmville has exactly as much value as your ridiculous car, and wastes a lot less money and resources to do it. There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours. Some would say you were wasting your time building art cars when you could be reading the world's great literature, or seeing the best painters, or learning to make music, etc. While you were busy fucking around with your car, the founders of Zynga were busy building a company that makes them ridiculously wealthy while bringing millions of people some enjoyment. And for the record, I have never played Farmville, nor do I have any interest in it, and I probably watch a total of 3-4 hours of TV a week. But I realize my hobbies would seem quite boring or uninspired to some, even though I enjoy them, and I realize mocking others for enjoying something I don't enjoy makes me the asshole wasting his time, not them.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Anonymous Coward]

You think art cars are better than farmville? ...really?

We're not talking cure for cancer here, you're talking ugly expensive waste-of-time hobby versus social fun hobby.

To each his own, but no need to be an elitist asshole about YOUR particular retarded hobby.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

I have to disagree. That car is definitely more interesting than someone playing farmville.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Krahar]

Only in the arbitrary and to the rest of us uninteresting metric of what happens to interest you in particular - which is exactly the OP's point.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Xarius]

Only to someone who doesn't play Farville.

(disclaimer: I have never played Farmville.)

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[drinkypoo]

WIW, I built a Snail art car instead of watching TV of frobbing with Farmville.

looks like you also build a snail webserver. ever heard of hosting?

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Geeky]

There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours..

My choice of entertainment is photography. Specifically taking fine art images of the female nude.

I like to think that beats Farmville.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[Chowderbags]

My hobby is disagreeing with people on message boards. The car definitely isn't interesting.

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[cparker15]

I missed the memo. When was "interesting" made an objective word?

Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Huh? I must have missed it too. If you find a copy, please forward it. Thanks.

Re:farmvill players are like sarah palin endorseme

[ezzzD55J]

And this isn't business. Nor politics.

They were supposed to fix this one instead..

[Anonymous Coward]

<a href="https://www.paypal.com/" onclick="
        var w = window.open('https://www.paypal.com/', '_blank', 'toolbar=1,menubar=1');
        setTimeout(function() {
                w.document.body.innerHTML = 'Fake content!';
                w.stop();
        }, 500);
        return false;
">https://www.paypal.com/</a>

.

and this whole time

[nimbius]

i thought farmville was another name for facebook in general.

Where is 3.6.5?

[PineHall]

What happened to Firefox 3.6.5? They skipped a number and went to 3.6.6.

Re:Where is 3.6.5?

[Riachu_11]

They were already working on 3.6.5 but wanted to push this out right away, so they made a new branch and fixed it there. 3.6.5 will be merged into 3.6.7.

Re:Where is 3.6.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this should have been 3.6.4.1 or something then?

Re:Where is 3.6.5?

[FunPika]

They were already working on 3.6.5 but wanted to push this out right away, so they made a new branch and fixed it there. 3.6.5 will be merged into 3.6.7.

*dies a little on the inside*

First of all... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f05S9x7BarE

Now then...the reason why 3.6.5 was skipped was to be consistent with the Gecko (the layout engine of Firefox) versions. 1.9.2.4 is what 3.6.4 used and 1.9.2.6 is what 3.6.6 is using. 1.9.2.5 was being used for Fennec (Firefox Mobile) so that version number was unavailable.

Off topic I know...

[thatskinnyguy]

but it reminds me of the last LAN party I went to. Someone suggested we play Farmville. To which the resounding reply was "FUCK YOUR MAFIAFARMWARSVILLE... quarium".

Not able to play Farmville?

[NotBornYesterday]

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

No, seriously ...

Crash Protection!? LMAO!

[kpainter]

This morning, Firefox updated itself to v3.6.6 after which, it started crashing on cnn, amazon and some other sites. Completely unstable. I reinstalled 3.5.10 and now it is fine again. What a piece of shit.

Flash can't be both

[tepples]

The alternative is either going without

Going without provides 0 revenue; you're effectively giving your business away to your competitor who uses a browser plugin.

writing a desktop application

The first-time user having to find the icon in the downloads folder and double-click to install it kills the spontaneity of trying out the application.

or (reliance on) browser plugins. Trying to hack in desktop behavior by resorting to Flash is the worst choice available.

Flash Player is a browser plugin. So how can it be both "the alternative" and "the worst choice available"?

As a female...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the suggestion! Age of Empires huh? Will have to check that out. :)

Re:As a female...

[hairyfeet]

You're welcome! I swear that game used to draw in so many females my former boss bought a case of the game, and then had me install it on every PC. I was like "WTF Doug? AoE 1? Two is out already!" and he just put a couple of PCs running the game in the windows and said "Watch and learn kid" and sure enough, it wasn't 20 minutes before girls started walking into the store going "Age of Empires? I looove that game!". We really increased sales to women by offering that game free with any PC purchase.

I think it is because unlike most games you never have to fight to succeed in AoE1. There are several ways to win without violence, such as building a monument, or a strategy I watched played many times by my sister I call the "Priests o' doom" where you build large walls around your camp and then send priests out to convert the enemy. With a large enough priest brigade one can take over entire villages without firing a shot.

But if you like long games with several ways to play give it a shot. I'm sure with the expansion packs you can get it for a little of nothing on Amazon, and with its random level generator you'll never play the same game twice. You might also want to try Good old games for tons of great strategy and other games, all under $10. For RPG I would suggest Divine Divinity or Sacred Gold (both great and looooong) and for strategy/rpg try King's Bounty: The Legend. By concentrating on magix you can kick butt on the above games without resorting to violence, and KB:The Legend even has your play affected by which woman you choose as a wife later in the game (don't choose the frog princess, she is seriously whiny!). All of the above are quite fun for both sexes IMHO. Enjoy!

f your crops

[Is0m0rph]

Stan: Just bring up my Facebook page and see what it says my status is! Kyle: Well, Stan I have to harvest my crops before it's too late. Stan: Dude! Fuck your crops! (walks up to Kyle's corn and starts ripping the stalks up) Kyle: Dude! Dude okay! Stop! I'm sorry! (pulls up Stan's status) Says that you are currently... hosting an online chat party for all your friends. Stan: Where? Kyle: Café World. Stan: Son of a bitch! (runs back to the barn he came out of)

Make this a configurable item..

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the deal? Just add this to the configurable data. So the END USER can decide what they want. In another month, are they going to have to increase it again because Google Apps or Microsoft's Online Office (or whatever it's called) times out?
 
Are developers becoming more stupid?

Farmville, Mafia Wars, Video games

[Anonymous Coward]

I quit playing video games years ago, when I came to the conclusion they wasted my time and nothing else was getting done. In other words, an addiction! I'd sit down, to play a few minutes, and look up at the clock when the 10pm news came on! Or worse, I'd see the 10 pm news, and say, well, just one more level, then it would be 2am. Just to test my theory, I hadn't touched a video game in 3-4 years, I "found" a copy of Quake 4, installed it and (on a weekend) started playing at 8pm, and quit at 3am!! LOL...yeah, addicted. I uninstalled it, shredded the CD. These people who are addicted, be it video games, porn, drugs...hopefully you'll see it before it consumes your life. You've seen countless youtube videos showing people going nuts when their computer crashes, power goes out, game levels get erased...put it down.

Alok

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice Post... Keep Posting

Shutting Down FarmVille

[wisnoskij]

Sounds more like a feature then a bug to me.

Wait, what?

[Zixaphir]

I think we are missing a huge piece of the puzzle here: Mozilla updated firefox to appease ITS users. Wow. I mean, seriously, wow. This is a huge step forward for Mozilla.

Farmville's fault

[theVicar]

I'm sure this has been pointed out already, but it's Farmville's fault. No Flash app should ever hang the browser for 10 seconds, or even 1 second. BlakeyFox's comment about "while(true)" is right on the money. Any operation that's going to take longer than a few frames should be broken up, and any (deservingly) self-respecting Flash programmer knows how to implement a loader.

Let me just say

[BigMeanBear]

.... and I can't stress this enough.

Fuck Farmville users in their stupid ears.

New Game?

[Anonymous Coward]

> To which the resounding reply was "FUCK YOUR MAFIAFARMWARSVILLE... quarium".

I just had this crazy thought about a game where you grow weed (and other things) under the sea, while having pimp shrimp pimp out the mermaids, hire actual loan sharks ...

If anyone turns that into an actual game, you need to include an AYBABTU reference as homage to the Slashdot post that gave you the idea.

And since I have never even heard of Farmville...

[FunPika]

I set dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs back to 10 in my about:config

Art, the other time waster

[SmallFurryCreature]

Funny, your alternative to the idiot tube is NOT to dig wells in poor countries or to find a cure for cancer, but to waste resources AND pollute the environment on some useless piece of trash?

Good news, you just won a ticket on the B-Ark. Enjoy.

Accept it, 99% of humanity is only there to occupy space. And yes, that includes you.

Facebook

[helix2301]

I think its actually interesting to see that many people play farmville that Firefox would put out an update just for those people. I also think this shows you how much Firefox cares about there users and browser. I run Firefox I think its the best browser out there right now.

Adobe is a fucker

[Anonymous Coward]

All these 'me too' comments and nobody is blaming adobe for the behaviour of the sucky adobe flash plugin. Incredible.

Just say no to flash.

Did I ever mention...

[jonadab]

Did I mention that I've gone back to Firefox 2.0.0.20? It's rock solid. Stable. Never gives me any trouble. Never loses data, or unexpectedly replaces the content of a tab -- unlike 3.x, which loses tabs on a regular basis.

If I needed one *more* bad thing to say about 3.x (as if mentioning the "awesomeness bar" weren't ammunition enough), now I can call it "the Farmville player's version". Haha. It's not a very substantive criticism, but it sure is amusing.

Is her name is Alberta, does she Live in Vancouver

[Overzeetop]

Just checking to see if this woman happens to live in Canada. Just sayin'...

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is a great operating system, lacking only a decent web browser.

Re:Crash Protection!? LMAO!

[kpainter]

The mod who modded me Redundant is a douche bag. So, he fact that FF v3.6.6 introduces a crash on my machine when in fact it was supposed to prevent crashes is Redundant? Typical Slashdot mod asswipe.

Spinning ball of death

[freaker_TuC]

It's not only Farmville, also Flash applets running in the background sucking up memory resulting in system slowdowns and a spinning ball of death every 15 seconds...

I don't know if I have to blame Firefox, Flash or Apple; but the mix is sure with Flash applets in it before spinning trouble touches me!

For me the most annoying behavior ever!

Fuck FarmVille

[Anonymous Coward]

So Flash crashed as I closed a tab with a video open. I waited, I wated, I waited for FF to shut this down while my CPU is pegged at 100% and I can hear my fans spinning up. After 30 seconds, I said fuck it, and restarted FF.

WTF us is crash protection if you have to wait almost an entire fucking minute for it to do anything. As a USER, this is bullshit.
i
And yeah, fuck Farmville.

Last spring/summer, I started working with the local elementary school in establishing an urban community garden, at the same time teaching gardening to urban kids who've never grown anything in their lives. Wildly successful. A LOT of the dudes in the neighborhood got into it and donated their time and money into making this thing work. Where are half the wives and girlfriends? Playing fucking FarmVille! I can't tell you how many times I've made a run back to someone's house to pick something up while actually working in the garden to find some dude's wife or girlfriend playing this game. While there's REAL gardening with their own communities outside. WTF?

Jesus fucking Christ. This shit has now become a goddamn disease of the mind.