It looks like the initial deployments will only support recent Windows and recent OS X releases. Let me know when they take the blinders off their tech support people so that Linux folks can set their OpenWRT gateways and Linux servers up with IPv6.
I wonder if Adobe has just given up on its pure 64-bit users (on both Windows and Linux) and decided that they can rot. I haven't seen a new Flash Player Square release mentioned anywhere since the last release came out. What on earth is preventing these people from supporting their 64-bit plugin with security updates?
If you read Linus' thoughts on the subject of numbering, he has stated numerous times that the Linux development process has moved so far beyond "new version = new features" that forcing it back into that paradigm for Linux 3.0 is broken. He believes instead that "new version = some time has passed + some new feature may be included". The fact that Linux 3.0 will be finalized and released very close to the 20th anniversary of the first Linux kernel is just a bonus.
That is both a hilarious joke and a very insightful take on the progression of GRUB; from my perspective, GRUB seems to be getting a little complicated for a bootloader. It's starting to make me nostalgic for LILO and Loadlin...
Agreed. The continued silence from Adobe regarding native 64-bit-capable Flash players for ANY platform is a major problem on their part that needs to be fixed - I haven't heard a word about new 64-bit releases for Windows or Mac OS X, much less Linux.
$SUBJECT. If AMD really means it, it bodes well for the future - I always hoped that their openness with the Linux community over the x86-64 porting effort wasn't a one-off.
The big question though is whether or not they will try for mainline inclusion, or if they will go with an out-of-tree effort.
Linux has already gone down this path - the old IP connection tracking code in the Linux iptables packet filter has already been reworked into a more general layer-3 connection tracking mechanism, with separate 'drivers' for tracking the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols and separate 'plugins' that can handle specialized protocols (FTP, IRC, H.323, PPTP and so on).
I suspect that commercial firewalls will probably follow suit.
Re:so I'll just keep asking...and getting no answe
on
Firefox 2 Alpha 2 Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Darin Fisher did this on the trunk in bug 326273. The complexity of the repair, as you surmised, means that Firefox 3.0 will be the first consumer release to contain these changes.
> 1. Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build.
It usually is. The yahoo.com crashes in 1.5 were one prime example - they were already fixed on both the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and the MOZILLA_1_8_0_BRANCH.
> 2. Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important.
While this is a rather contentious thing to say, it's usually true - there often _are_ bugs that are more important, and very little (except getting more people to hack Firefox and fix the unglamourous bugs) is going to change that.
> 3. No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated.]
This is rare - TalkBack usually runs for most crashes, and for ones that don't generate a report, someone can usually apply some debugger-fu to make it happen.
> 4. If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug.
This is an excuse?
> 5. This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]
So? If you're reporting more than one bug in a single report, then it gets much harder to fix each of them. Separate bugs, separate reports - that's the way Bugzilla works.
> 6. You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash Opera.]
Can you give an example?
> 7. I don't like the way you worded your report. (So, I didn't read it or think about it.)
If the bug report is crap, who's going to read it? Bugs don't get fixed if you can't properly explain what the bug is.
> 8. You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. (Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.)
Why is this a Bad Thing? Some users are more than happy to do this - I personally haven't seen more than a few bugs in Bugzilla where this was even requested.
> 9. Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
Sad, but sometimes, true.
> 10. If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week.]
This sort of thing is subjective.
> 11. Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site.]
Advertisement on website != Well-written.
> 12. Your problem is probably caused a corrupt profile.
This is almost always the primary, major source of just about all of the problems experienced by most users. That's why there's been so much effort with mechanisms like the Extension Manager modifications, the extension versioning mechanism, the bookmarks-backup code, and the general depreciation of profiles in order to prevent users from misusing them and potentially breaking their Firefox installation.
The reason why these so-called "usability bugs" don't get fixed is because the users, upon finding out about the bug, scream and holler and fill up the bug report with lots of useless spam, advocacy, and flaming.
This of course turns off the people capable of fixing the original issue, and it thus gets ignored. A good first step would be creating a new Bugzilla bug, containing a distilled report of the pertinent issues surrounding the problem, and ensuring that it does not get spammed.
You should be glad that Firefox crashed - it exposed a number of flaws in the Gecko rendering engine that will now be fixed, thus making the browser more robust.
You can use the Session Saver extension to restore your current browser state (i.e. the open tabs).
The reason why Firefox seems to be crashing for you could be twofold: 1) bugs in the 3rd-party closed-source plugins that you are using, and 2) cruft in your Firefox profile which eats memory and causes browser instability.
The sad truth is that bugs in plugins and bugs in extensions are one of the fastest ways to wreck a user's experience of Firefox - all the more so because the program itself is perfectly fine; it's the data the program is using which is broken...
They're referring to the bfcache, a mechanism designed to retain the DOM of a webpage and regenerate it when going back or forward. It was added by Brian Ryner during the 1.8 development cycle.
I always thought that a PSU got hot due to resistance in the circuitry caused by high amperage draw, and that this was the primary reason for the huge heatsinks seen inside the unit.
Various laws of electricity show that switching to a higher voltage significantly lowers the amount of amperage needed to sustain a given wattage rating at a given load, thereby lowering the resistance in the circuitry and thus generating less heat...
Nope. As an extension dev, I like the fact that they break - it forces me to ensure that the extension really is compatible with that particular build.
1.) OS X builds of Firefox 1.5b1 are _much_ more stable than their 1.0.x cousins. If you take a look at the URL below you'll see a great big stack of bugfixes, including many for OS X.
I don't think this issue exists anymore - if you type a URL into the URL bar in a blank tab and try to load it, and you end up with an "untitled" tab, the URL remains in the URL bar, allowing you to reissue the request.
Besides, if you have error pages enabled you'll get a nice error page saying what the problem was, and the URL bar will _still_ be in the URL bar!:-)
How do you know that IE is rendering the page correctly? IE has many known quirks when it comes to things like box models and padding and element size within pages. While I accept that there may be some minor issues, it hardly seems like the tag soup crapfest that you allude to in your post.
The Firefox web site doesn't deliberately break IE anyway - is the site unreadable? Is it blank? Is it corrupted? A basic issue like over-stretched content hardly seems that terrible, under the circumstances. Besides, I doubt the Mozilla.org webmasters are that rabid about the W3C anyway - why would they write a site that deliberately broke a browser that is still used, despite the efforts of many, by a majority?
It's Adblock. Go and get the unofficial Adblock v0.5.9.2 and install it into 1.5b1 - I'll bet that your issues will go away.
And the "genious new extension structure" does _not_ break old extensions - the 1.0.x extension documentation is still valid and will be for some time.
The Mozilla Suite is not dead - a group of hackers have gotten together and created the Seamonkey Project, dedicated to maintaing the Suite and bringing it into line with the core codebase used to create Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu, Sunbird and the rest of the menagerie.
Cairo is not part of Gecko 1.8, which is the version of Gecko used by Firefox 1.5b1. Cairo will be part of Gecko 1.9, from which Firefox 2.0 will be released upon.
As for eating CPU and RAM, I haven't seen an issue like that in a long time. I suspect that most such bugs were squashed as part of the efforts surrounding Gecko 1.8.
Indeed. Both of these extensions are causing trouble for 1.5b1. The best version of Adblock to use is the unofficial version 0.5.9.2, as it is being actively developed. I think the developer of Flashgot has already updated his extension.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the initial deployments will only support recent Windows and recent OS X releases. Let me know when they take the blinders off their tech support people so that Linux folks can set their OpenWRT gateways and Linux servers up with IPv6.
I wonder if Adobe has just given up on its pure 64-bit users (on both Windows and Linux) and decided that they can rot. I haven't seen a new Flash Player Square release mentioned anywhere since the last release came out. What on earth is preventing these people from supporting their 64-bit plugin with security updates?
If you read Linus' thoughts on the subject of numbering, he has stated numerous times that the Linux development process has moved so far beyond "new version = new features" that forcing it back into that paradigm for Linux 3.0 is broken. He believes instead that "new version = some time has passed + some new feature may be included". The fact that Linux 3.0 will be finalized and released very close to the 20th anniversary of the first Linux kernel is just a bonus.
That is both a hilarious joke and a very insightful take on the progression of GRUB; from my perspective, GRUB seems to be getting a little complicated for a bootloader. It's starting to make me nostalgic for LILO and Loadlin...
Agreed. The continued silence from Adobe regarding native 64-bit-capable Flash players for ANY platform is a major problem on their part that needs to be fixed - I haven't heard a word about new 64-bit releases for Windows or Mac OS X, much less Linux.
$SUBJECT. If AMD really means it, it bodes well for the future - I always hoped that their openness with the Linux community over the x86-64 porting effort wasn't a one-off.
The big question though is whether or not they will try for mainline inclusion, or if they will go with an out-of-tree effort.
Linux has already gone down this path - the old IP connection tracking code in the Linux iptables packet filter has already been reworked into a more general layer-3 connection tracking mechanism, with separate 'drivers' for tracking the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols and separate 'plugins' that can handle specialized protocols (FTP, IRC, H.323, PPTP and so on).
I suspect that commercial firewalls will probably follow suit.
Darin Fisher did this on the trunk in bug 326273. The complexity of the repair, as you surmised, means that Firefox 3.0 will be the first consumer release to contain these changes.
7 3
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3262
It does allow that - but the entities are defined in UTF-8 text files, not XML files.
> 1. Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build.
It usually is. The yahoo.com crashes in 1.5 were one prime example - they were already fixed on both the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and the MOZILLA_1_8_0_BRANCH.
> 2. Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important.
While this is a rather contentious thing to say, it's usually true - there often _are_ bugs that are more important, and very little (except getting more people to hack Firefox and fix the unglamourous bugs) is going to change that.
> 3. No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated.]
This is rare - TalkBack usually runs for most crashes, and for ones that don't generate a report, someone can usually apply some debugger-fu to make it happen.
> 4. If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug.
This is an excuse?
> 5. This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]
So? If you're reporting more than one bug in a single report, then it gets much harder to fix each of them. Separate bugs, separate reports - that's the way Bugzilla works.
> 6. You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash Opera.]
Can you give an example?
> 7. I don't like the way you worded your report. (So, I didn't read it or think about it.)
If the bug report is crap, who's going to read it? Bugs don't get fixed if you can't properly explain what the bug is.
> 8. You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. (Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.)
Why is this a Bad Thing? Some users are more than happy to do this - I personally haven't seen more than a few bugs in Bugzilla where this was even requested.
> 9. Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
Sad, but sometimes, true.
> 10. If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week.]
This sort of thing is subjective.
> 11. Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site.]
Advertisement on website != Well-written.
> 12. Your problem is probably caused a corrupt profile.
This is almost always the primary, major source of just about all of the problems experienced by most users. That's why there's been so much effort with mechanisms like the Extension Manager modifications, the extension versioning mechanism, the bookmarks-backup code, and the general depreciation of profiles in order to prevent users from misusing them and potentially breaking their Firefox installation.
The reason why these so-called "usability bugs" don't get fixed is because the users, upon finding out about the bug, scream and holler and fill up the bug report with lots of useless spam, advocacy, and flaming.
This of course turns off the people capable of fixing the original issue, and it thus gets ignored. A good first step would be creating a new Bugzilla bug, containing a distilled report of the pertinent issues surrounding the problem, and ensuring that it does not get spammed.
A perfect example is Bug 38486.
You should be glad that Firefox crashed - it exposed a number of flaws in the Gecko rendering engine that will now be fixed, thus making the browser more robust.
You can use the Session Saver extension to restore your current browser state (i.e. the open tabs).
The reason why Firefox seems to be crashing for you could be twofold: 1) bugs in the 3rd-party closed-source plugins that you are using, and 2) cruft in your Firefox profile which eats memory and causes browser instability.
The sad truth is that bugs in plugins and bugs in extensions are one of the fastest ways to wreck a user's experience of Firefox - all the more so because the program itself is perfectly fine; it's the data the program is using which is broken...
What clipboard bug? Most of the clipboard bugs I know of occur only when running Firefox under XFree86 (i.e. on Linux).
It was fixed. See the following bug:
2 5 - mind the /. filter.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3108
They're referring to the bfcache, a mechanism designed to retain the DOM of a webpage and regenerate it when going back or forward. It was added by Brian Ryner during the 1.8 development cycle.
I always thought that a PSU got hot due to resistance in the circuitry caused by high amperage draw, and that this was the primary reason for the huge heatsinks seen inside the unit.
Various laws of electricity show that switching to a higher voltage significantly lowers the amount of amperage needed to sustain a given wattage rating at a given load, thereby lowering the resistance in the circuitry and thus generating less heat...
Nope. As an extension dev, I like the fact that they break - it forces me to ensure that the extension really is compatible with that particular build.
1.) OS X builds of Firefox 1.5b1 are _much_ more stable than their 1.0.x cousins. If you take a look at the URL below you'll see a great big stack of bugfixes, including many for OS X.
5 b1.html
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.
2.) That sounds like an issue with JavaScript menus - I doubt it's the browser's fault per se; it could be an issue with the way the menu is designed.
I don't think this issue exists anymore - if you type a URL into the URL bar in a blank tab and try to load it, and you end up with an "untitled" tab, the URL remains in the URL bar, allowing you to reissue the request.
:-)
Besides, if you have error pages enabled you'll get a nice error page saying what the problem was, and the URL bar will _still_ be in the URL bar!
How do you know that IE is rendering the page correctly? IE has many known quirks when it comes to things like box models and padding and element size within pages. While I accept that there may be some minor issues, it hardly seems like the tag soup crapfest that you allude to in your post.
The Firefox web site doesn't deliberately break IE anyway - is the site unreadable? Is it blank? Is it corrupted? A basic issue like over-stretched content hardly seems that terrible, under the circumstances. Besides, I doubt the Mozilla.org webmasters are that rabid about the W3C anyway - why would they write a site that deliberately broke a browser that is still used, despite the efforts of many, by a majority?
It's Adblock. Go and get the unofficial Adblock v0.5.9.2 and install it into 1.5b1 - I'll bet that your issues will go away.
And the "genious new extension structure" does _not_ break old extensions - the 1.0.x extension documentation is still valid and will be for some time.
The Mozilla Suite is not dead - a group of hackers have gotten together and created the Seamonkey Project, dedicated to maintaing the Suite and bringing it into line with the core codebase used to create Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu, Sunbird and the rest of the menagerie.
See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ for more info.
Cairo is not part of Gecko 1.8, which is the version of Gecko used by Firefox 1.5b1. Cairo will be part of Gecko 1.9, from which Firefox 2.0 will be released upon.
As for eating CPU and RAM, I haven't seen an issue like that in a long time. I suspect that most such bugs were squashed as part of the efforts surrounding Gecko 1.8.
Indeed. Both of these extensions are causing trouble for 1.5b1. The best version of Adblock to use is the unofficial version 0.5.9.2, as it is being actively developed. I think the developer of Flashgot has already updated his extension.