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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.'"
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.
That Firefox users were smarter internet users.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
people playing FarmVille on Facebook complained that their browser was shutting down the game.
"It's a *Feature*.
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if they're needed to win, I don't mind losing. But that's why I'm not in business. Or politics.
Behold, decades of networking research and painstaking software development has brought us to this moment--watering tomatoes on a website.
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.
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.
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
Now we know what the mozilla guys are doing while their code is compiling... harvesting crops!
I don't think that was a bug, looks like more of a sign of AI on the browser's part.
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.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
Why is this release numbered 3.6.6 and not 3.6.5(which is 0.0.1 more than the previous release)?
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.
Except that this wasn't just isolated to Farmville players.
Or more accurately: centuries of technological advances has brought us full cycle, except this time we are growing food we can't eat!?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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,
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...
I would bet that World of Warcraft has a significantly higher bandwidth requirement, and nearly as many users...
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?
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."
And this isn't business. Nor politics.
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.
i thought farmville was another name for facebook in general.
Good people go to bed earlier.
What happened to Firefox 3.6.5? They skipped a number and went to 3.6.6.
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".
The game.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
...
No, seriously
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
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"?
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)
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.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sounds more like a feature then a bug to me.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
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.
---The Vicar---
.... and I can't stress this enough.
Fuck Farmville users in their stupid ears.
+= E
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I set dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs back to 10 in my about:config
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Just checking to see if this woman happens to live in Canada. Just sayin'...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..