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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.'"
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?
sig? uhh, umm, ok
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...).
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.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
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.
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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.
Play some more here. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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"?
I have to disagree. That car is definitely more interesting than someone playing farmville.
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.