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Mozilla Updates Firefox To Appease FarmVille Users

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-only-they-could-be-motivated-to-be-a-force-of-good dept.

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.'"

6 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Also affects Flash developers by josath · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

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    sig? uhh, umm, ok
    1. Re:Also affects Flash developers by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

  2. Re:Where was 3.6.5? by woddfellow2 · · Score: 3, Informative
    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).

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    1-Crawl 2-Cnfg 3-ATF 4-Exit ?
  3. Re:Technology outcome by eastlight_jim · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Technology outcome by antdude · · Score: 3, Informative

    Play some more here. ;)

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    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  5. Re:Need for more varied beta testers by Eraesr · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.