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Mozilla The Internet

DHTML Bug Found in Mozilla 1.2 364

Posted by michael from the how-did-that-get-in-there dept.
joyoflinux writes "The people at Mozilla have announced that Mozilla 1.2 contained a bug that caused sites that use DHTML to fail (more on the front page). They have pulled 1.2 from the releases page, pending a 1.2.1 release."
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DHTML Bug Found in Mozilla 1.2 More

DHTML Bug Found in Mozilla 1.2

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  • Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fucksl4shd0t ( 630000 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:33AM (#4783081) Homepage Journal
    Interesting that every couple of months when Mozilla has a bug or exploit or something people talk all kinds of trash, but forget about other competitors (IE) that have new exploits almost daily.

    All in all, bug for bug, line by line, even accounting for the massive differences in complexity (mozilla is by far a more complex project that IE ever wanted to be), I'd have to say that Mozilla has less show-stopping bugs and fewer exploits than IE.

    • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

      by whereiswaldo ( 459052 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:36AM (#4783090) Journal
      I'd have to say that Mozilla has less show-stopping bugs and fewer exploits than IE.

      Until I hear different, that's my impression, too. But personally, I think the Phoenix project based on Mozilla has a lot of promise. It is a blazingly fast browser and is quick to startup, too. Amazing!

      At least this bug today wasn't a security-related bug, like *cough* IE *cough* Outlook *cough* windows *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* goddamn! *cough* *cough* Microsoft
      feck
      *cough* *cough* *cough* must... hit.. submit...

      • At least this bug today wasn't a security-related bug, like *cough* IE *cough* Outlook *cough* windows *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* goddamn! *cough* *cough* Microsoft
        feck
        *cough* *cough* *cough* must... hit..
        submit...

        Hey whereiswaldo, I think you need to get a new keyboard. Yours appears to have developed a serious cough.

    • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)

      by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @01:00PM (#4784066) Homepage
      " Interesting that every couple of months when Mozilla has a bug or exploit or something"

      This isn't an exploit or even a crash or dataloss bug. This is just a visual glitch that you'll get on some pages with DHTML. The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days when the 1.2.1 release out so the high-visibility links were commented out for the time being.

      --Asa

  • Some bugs are more buggy than others? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Seehund ( 86897 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:35AM (#4783084) Homepage Journal
    They retract a release because of this?

    I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this [mozilla.org] bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.
    • uhhhhhh.... links to bugzilla from slashdot are disabled. :)
      • Crud. Well, copy and paste then. :)

        If someone can't be bothered to do that, that bug is preventing pasting of more than 4000 bytes from other apps into Mozilla. 4kB ain't much, for example pasting spam mails into SpamCop [spamcop.net] forms usually won't work, most spammers aren't too considerate about the size of their spam... :-P
    • So a bug that renders some (albeit poorly designed) websites unusable is far less important than having to copy text a page at a time?

      I send a fair amount of email, and have never had the need to copy that much text, anything much bigger should really be an attachment. As for other purposes, care to give some examples?

      • The bug I linked to was just an example of a highly disruptive bug. Examples? See my Spamcop example above, or let's say you want to copy-n-paste part of an article into a Slashdot post, or use Mozilla's Composer and paste text/code into that, or paste something into a Bugzilla(!) form, and so on and so forth.

        In comparison to that, how many sites actually fail to display at all because of this DHTML bug?

        My point was that I don't see the need to retract releases unless they contain harmful bugs.
        • I think the basic problem is that 1.0.1 and 1.1 works so well that few people bothered to test the 1.2 alpha and beta. Hence serious bugs showing up in the release.

          • Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good! (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Querty ( 1128 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @06:24AM (#4783202) Homepage
            That's actually not entirely true.

            One of the websites I helped build is broken in 1.2 (just noticed it yesterday). This was working fine in 1.2b, as well as in a homebuilt CVS version somewhere in the cycle leading up to 1.2.

            I think a "Release Candidate" should have been put out, which when tested for a while should have become 1.2 final without any further changes.
            • One of the websites I helped build is broken in 1.2 (just noticed it yesterday). This was working fine in 1.2b, as well as in a homebuilt CVS version somewhere in the cycle leading up to 1.2.
              I see... Mod parent up and mod parent.parent down.
              I think a "Release Candidate" should have been put out, which when tested for a while should have become 1.2 final without any further changes.
              If 1.2 had been called 1.2rc1 and had been released as 1.2, it would still have had this bug. :-)

            • The real cause of the DHTML bug (Score:4, Insightful)

              by jesup ( 8690 ) <(randellslashdot) (at) (jesup.org)> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @07:22PM (#4785321) Homepage
              The DHTML bug was caused by an 1-character-incorrect backout of a patch that I did in too much of a hurry (removed the entry from the list, but didn't adjust the count). Mea Culpa. This happened 2 weeks before 1.2 final, but most testers were working on 1.3 by that time, and the ones that weren't didn't visit the type of DHTML that causes the problem (most DHTML doesn't have the problem). There was a separate problem where the wrong files were tagged (some recent fixes weren't included).

              We're fixing these and will have an updated build up soon. How long would Microsoft take to fix this sort of problem?... (Let alone tell you why the problem happened.)

          • I'm not sure that's entirely true. My theory is that, for all the Moz team's usually excellent efforts, 1.2b was awful and they should have released a 1.2c (if only, as others have suggested, as a "release candidate"). I downloaded 1.2b myself, intending to test out some fixes in the XSLT stuff I'd been waiting for. Unfortunately, it failed to render even basic pages properly several times in a typical browsing session, and I uninstalled it and reverted to 1.1 within an hour.

            Still more unfortunately, I didn't have any useful concrete information to send them, and even if I had, I don't have anything set-up to use Bugzilla. It would be really helpful if there were a "report bug" menu option in test releases of Moz that did all of that for you, rather than expecting Joe Average User to (a) know Bugzilla exists and (b) take the time to use it. Just MHO, of course. (If there is one and I've just never found it, someone please supply a link!)

    • You could always down your favorite platform's nightly build. Or wait a few days, if the uncertainty of a bleeding edge isn't for you.

    • Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others? (Score:4, Informative)

      by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @01:04PM (#4784085) Homepage
      They retract a release because of this?

      I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this [mozilla.org] bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.

      You're right that this isn't a serious security hole or even a crash or dataloss bug. But it is something that we'd like to fix and make available quickly. The 1.2 release is still available if you want it. Just go to FTP and download. We're very close to putting out something with a fix for this DHTML problem and figured it was better to save folks the extra download by asking them to wait a day or two for the fixed version. The easy way to do that was to pull the high-proifile links to that build until we had a better build to put in its place.

      --Asa

  • What?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trotski ( 592530 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:40AM (#4783105)
    A bug in mozilla??? No way, you've got to be jokeing!!!

    Seriously though, although Mozilla has it's faults, (this being a prime example). It is still the cutting edge of browser technology. I mean, theres one feature that wins over every person I've recommended Mozilla to: the ability to stop pop ups from apearing. ALthough Mozilla is still rough around the edges, it is still my browser of choice.

  • Mozilla Bugs... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trotski ( 592530 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:43AM (#4783114)
    Finding Bugs like this is proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser. With open source and lots of people contributing, bugs are found and elliminated quickly.

    Microsoft IE on the other hand, bugs take time to find and even more time to repair due to the slow reaction of a large organization. This is probably why we hear so much about Mozilla bugs, they're far easier to uncover than bugs in IE or other browser.

    PErsonally, I think Mozilla users should concider this a Good Thing, it means that your browser of choice is getting better!

    • Talk about spin and hyposcrisy. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The world in an OSS zealot's View:

      IE bugs: "What a crappy browser!"

      Mozilla bugs: "This is proof Mozilla rules!"

    • Pardon? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Shade, The ( 252176 )
      This was a pretty major(ish) bug (though not security related, like the majority of IE's) that they found in a major release. In short, the Mozilla crew, programming gurus though they may be, screwed up.

      They don't make excuses. They've pulled the browser and are working on an update. Please don't make excuses for them.

    • Great browser for half the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)

      by melonman ( 608440 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @06:44AM (#4783238) Journal

      proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser

      The points about spin have already been covered, so can I ask how many banking sites you have tried to use recently?

      Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).

      Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows. The Mozilla-on-remote-X bug is so longstanding that there is now a lobbying campaign to get it fixed...

      So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet, or if it worked over a network.

      • FUD (Score:2)

        by bogie ( 31020 )
        "Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows."

        Haven't had those problems since the M release days.

        "So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet"

        Oh so it doesn't work on HALF of the Internet? Umm Ok. Funny for me it work on the vast majority of the Internet. In fact only sites that have any problems are sites that refuse to code to standards. Of course if the webmasters there don't respond to my email to fix there site then screw em, I'll take my business elsewhere thank you. These are the same banks that will no doubt embrace Palladium with glee.

        I've switched to Phoenix full time on both windows and linux and while only a moron says things are perfect, I say things are pretty dam good and I'm very happy with my browsing experience.

        In fact since you "claim" to be a linux user what exactly do you use on linux since Mozilla is such crap?

        But then again half of your posts are defending Microsoft against us irrational Linux users. I could see now and then pointing out some linux zealots, but really looking at your posts the majority of recent ones ALL defend Microsoft. So how do you explain that? Most linux and opensource users are slightly less militant then the /. ones, but even they don't constantly go out of their way to defend MS which you seem to do. Is there something you want to confess?
      • Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).
        Mind sharing a URL? I've got a minimum font size of 13 configured (my eyes, well, suck. :/ ) and I haven't had many problems. ATI's site used to be horrendous in that regard (I swear they were using 2pt fonts!) but now the web is readable.

        BTW - a lot of the sites that won't work with Mozilla are in such a state due to retarded webmasters who do browser-checks. For whatever reason, Sprint Canada [sprint.ca] has decided that "Netscape 7 is not supported", whereas Netscape Communicator is. Wait - scratch that. I seem to be able to browse their entire site using Phoenix and Mozilla 1.2. Ok, so they've fixed themselves.

        If you don't like the fact that a site doesn't work in a standards-compliant browser like Mozilla, complain to the webmaster not Slashdot.

      • Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).

        Did you try the little box at the bottom of the fonts section of the preferences labelled "minimum font size"? I would, but you don't give any references, so you're not really helping at all.

  • bugzilla link (Score:5, Informative)

    by J. Random Software ( 11097 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:45AM (#4783118)
    I'm guessing it's bug 182500 [mozilla.org] (or at least the bugs referred to there). Something about document.write() dropping leading characters.

    IMHO documents that completely rely on ECMAScript are inherently broken anyway.

    • "IMHO documents that completely rely on ECMAScript are inherently broken anyway."

      IMHO you are right, but:

      What happens when you provide an alternative navigation if the browser doesn't support or use ECMAScript?

      That's right, your code is fooled into using the DHTML version because everything seems just hunky dorey. It's really hard to test every step of the way if you're not producing some ECMAScript error.

  • but HOW? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FuegoFuerte ( 247200 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:47AM (#4783125)
    What I'd like to know (and this is NOT meant as a flame any way, I love mozilla), is HOW exactly do big bugs like this get into final releases? I mean, the 1.2 release was more than a month behind what was scheduled on the roadmap, and yet it still ends up with this in it? Is it just the number of people who don't bother with nightlies or reporting bugs? I would think there would be enough people using the nightlies to find fairly significant bugs like this. Perhaps the fine mozilla people need to add a "gamma" release after "alpha" and "beta" but before "final"? Have the gamma and final be seperated by one week, and ONLY incorporate bugfixes which don't affect major parts of the code? I don't quite know what the answer is, but it seems something should be done. All in all though, great browser.
    • Mozilla is an experimental browser. It's not even meant for end users -- that's right, the intent is that end user browsers (Netscape, Galeon, etc) will be built from Mozilla.

      It's got bugs. If you want to sacrifice new features in exchange for fewer bugs, download the latest Mozilla 1.0.x release.

    • Re:but HOW? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by caillon ( 629714 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @08:03AM (#4783325) Homepage

      Long story short, a patch got checked in on the trunk before we branched, it caused problems, we noticed it and asked that it got backed out on both the trunk and the 1.2 branch. It got backed out OK on the trunk, but somehow it didn't get fully backed out on the branch...

      From the bug: "It looks like the 1.2-branch backout was done incorrectly. The 9 was not changed to an 8."

    • Bugs like this get into final releases, because Mozilla releases are branched straight off the trunk and while they are reasonably tested, they do not receive anything like the amount of testing that a stable Netscape release gets. In other words, from time to time, a milestone release is going to contain a bug that might have been caught with more time and QA. Presumably in this case, Mozilla 1.3 is far enough away and the regression serious enough that they decided to pull 1.2 and release a fixed version.


      Therefore the choice as always is use Mozilla if you want new features but run the risk of more bugs, or Netscape if you want ultra stable but with commercial stuff added. Of course the more eyeballs testing betas and nightlies, the more likely bugs like this won't happen in future.

  • I use mozilla all the time, and I'd be more interested in them fixing the bug in mozilla that causes it close when doing searches on ebay.

    I constantly have to open another browser, in order to use ebay.

    Anyone else have this problem?

  • arrrrggghhhh (Score:5, Informative)

    by vsync64 ( 155958 ) <vsync@quadium.net> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:55AM (#4783150) Homepage
    This really isn't fair. From the end of my most recent log entry [quadium.net]:

    I'm extremely upset. 8 hours ago I downloaded Mozilla 1.2b for Win32 for Joie's parents' computer. It looks like they released 1.2 while I was downloading 1.2b. This isn't the first time a fresh download of mine has been obsoleted, but never this quickly.

    So today I downloaded 1.2. This is quite upsetting.

    Anyway, in order to save Bugzilla the crush, I'm pasting the bug report (#182500) here. It seems that the main issues are broken user-defined XML tags, broken document.write(), and checkins to the 1.2 branch missing in the release.

    This is a meta-bug whose dependencies will be problems caused by the incorrect backout described in bug 167493 comment 21. Some of these bugs have been reported as Windows-only, but I've also been able to reproduce them on a gcc 3.2.1 Linux build with -O2.

    ------- Additional Comment #1 From David Baron 2002-11-28 07:38 -------
    I've corrected the backout on the 1.2 branch (although I admit I only tested the change on the trunk, but I did the backout by backing out the backout with cvs up -j -j and then backing out the original checkin the same way). It remains to be seen what (if anything) we'll do with the 1.2 release.

    ------- Additional Comment #2 From Malcolm Rowe 2002-11-28 08:26 -------
    We may have to do something with the 1.2 branch anyway. Some of the checkins to the 1.2 branch disappeared from the 1.2 release - see bug 182506.

    ------- Additional Comment #3 From David Baron 2002-11-28 09:07 -------
    I think I've gone through all the Browser bugs filed between the 1.2 release and now (mostly by just skimming bug summaries), and added all the relevant dependencies. However, bug 182317 and bug 182433 are probably also dependencies of this bug, but I didn't add them since I'm not sure.

    ------- Additional Comment #4 From Phil Schwartau 2002-11-28 13:21 -------
    Note I've added this bug as a dependency:

    bug 182253, "document.write() eats initial characters in 1.2"

    It explains why so many sites with DHTML menus are being hit by the current bug. The sites are using document.write() to create them -

    ------- Additional Comment #5 From Dawn Endico 2002-11-29 16:50 -------
    I removed links to 1.2 from the releases page and the home page, and announced the release of 1.2.1 when we have a correct tag and new builds. Since this happened on a 4 day holiday weekend the new release may not happen till Monday.

    ------- Additional Comment #6 From Bryan 2002-11-29 17:28 -------
    Hi,
    Yes I did see it happen in that relase but somebody beated me to the punch. Are you giong to remove it form the ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/realses page or you going to keep it there for people to download and test this problem. IF you can e-mail me wiht that info that will be great I will like to see still on there for the people who want to take risks like me.

    ------- Additional Comment #7 From Asa Dotzler 2002-11-29 20:10 -------
    We're not talking about a security exploit or even major dataloss here. I see no need to re-write history. The 1.2 release will stay where it is.

    This bug is likely to see some traffic. I'm taking this oportunity to ask all of you folks that read about this bug at mozillazine or slashdot or wherever to not comment. Unless you're actually working on this problem your comments will only get in the way. Thanks.

    [Emphasis mine.]

  • Patching Mozilla 1.2 instead of full download? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Bullard ( 62082 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @06:08AM (#4783179) Homepage
    It's only a surface wound. Really, I'm alright, I just need a bandaid...
  • and in other news: this is what IBM, Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, etc. etc. find through testing every day. They find some, they miss some. Somebody found one in Mozilla. Why is this news?
    • This is news because it was severe enough to back out of the release.

      It's like an automotive recall or toy choking hazard:
      DHTML could explode and make you go blind if you keep using Mozilla 1.2. Several Tripod users and viewers of garish movie promo sites have already sustained serious mental frustration. We are working with local authorities to prevent riots.

      -Kevin

  • Mozilla iSwitch. (Score:5, Funny)

    by trotski ( 592530 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @06:28AM (#4783210)
    I was browsing a DHTML page, In mozilla
    and it was all like beep-beep-beep-beep
    and then like the web page was gone,
    and I was like hmm?
    it devouered the webpage, it was a really good webpage
    and then I had to look it up again in IE and it wasn't as good.
    It's kind of... a bummer.
    I'm some guy and I have way too much time on my hands.

  • Just to clarify (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30, 2002 @06:39AM (#4783227)
    This was an unfortunate last minute CVS error (a buggy piece of code was not correctly backed out), causing a major regression. Symptoms include content failing to display, or javascript errors on javascript heavy sites, or some sites using invalid html. No build other than 1.2final is affected. If you want mozilla without this bug now, you can try the latest 1.3a nightly or go back to 1.2b.

    1.2.1 is *not* avaliable yet, and may not be until Monday (since the USA is having a 4 day weekend). It may be possible to compile 1.2.1 for yourself before this, but I'm not entirely sure.

  • Composer & scripting issues. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30, 2002 @06:58AM (#4783257)
    As Mozilla issues go, this [mozilla.org] has got to be one of the more annoying ones, but apparently nobody wants to actively work on it. "Composer" is actually not a bad WYSIWYG html editor at all - it has alot of potential. But as long as it strips / corrupts PHP and other scripting code, it will never be very useful to anyone doing anything beyond the most trivial of web pages.

    The Mozilla-dev folks need to wake up and realize that just about any web designer these days is using some degree of scripting.. Composer needs to at the very least ignore (and not corrupt) scripting blocks. Composer is quite an excellent html editor generally, but as long as it continues to act brain-damaged in regards to any unknown blocks it encounters, it is not going to be truly useful for anybody other than your Great Aunt Emma working on her Geocities homepage.

    Right now, if you need PHP and still want to do your page design in Composer, you have only two options: (1) Every time you tweak the page in Composer, insert all your PHP by hand, or (2) Put your own "#PHPBlock1" tags in the html and have a script replace it with the neccessary PHP code later. Having to do either is annoying. Composer simply shouldn't mangle PHP blocks at all.

    I'm pretty sure there's another outstanding bug regarding the fact that Composer cannot save 'fragments' - if you're merely designing a table or template to be generated via PHP, there is no way to have Mozilla save it as a fragment, without header tags etc. A bit of a nitpick, but really, how much effort would it take to code in a "Save as fragment" option?

    Mozilla is quite an impressive accomplishment for open source, I really do think Mozilla smokes IE hands down these days.. but these Composer bugs should have been fixed long ago - not enough people care about this aspect of Mozilla. A little bit of work here could go a long ways towards undercutting commercial HTML editors in a big way.

  • Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have Been (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cedars ( 566854 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @07:03AM (#4783266)
    To follow links in this message you will need to copy and then paste them in the HTML bar since Bugzilla won't let /.ers through directly.

    Usually I'm delighted to hear when Mozilla releases a new browser as, up until recently, Mozilla was my browser of choice. But when I heard about the Mozilla 1.2 release I was just disappointed.

    The Mozilla team had been alerted to major bugs which only recently appeared in the browser like this one [mozilla.org] and some of these [mozilla.org] (the latter link also has the comment in which a few poeple suggest Mozilla 1.2 should be unreleased) and yet still the team proceeded with this release. I'm not pretending that it's everyone's experience, but certainly as far as my own experience, Mozilla 1.2 is the first Mozilla browser to step further backwards than forwards - and I know I'm not the only one who thinks that. IMHO, it's a shame that such a great browser which was really beginning to show its potential had to make such a disappointing release. And for all that, I have to wonder what were the critical changes that led to all the aforementioned bugs (the implementation of type ahead searching!?!).

    It's too late for me, I've stopped using Mozilla on my Mac (still using the Gecko-based Chimera though) and have halted upgrades of it on my PC, so I guess all there is to say is better luck next time and hopefully we'll be fortunate enough to never see a release as bad as this one ever again.

    • Re:Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have B (Score:5, Insightful)

      by caillon ( 629714 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @10:29AM (#4783627) Homepage

      "The Mozilla team had been alerted to major bugs which only recently appeared in the browser"

      Sorry. Just because you filed a bug and posted a comment on another does not mean the Mozilla team was alerted. If there is a showstopper bug, filing it in Bugzilla does not guarantee it will get noticed if everyone is busy with final preparations for a release, and trying to get ready for the impending alpha. Don't forget that the people involved with Mozilla get tons of email from bugs, review requests, etc. as well as have real lives in which they eat turkey and go Christmas shopping. Bugs sometimes slip through the cracks. Hop on to IRC next time and make sure that one of the drivers, or even a developer or QA person knows about your bug if you think it is an absolute showstopper.

      It definitely sucks that this bug was in a release. But things happen. Hopefully it won't again.

    • Mozilla 1.2 is not the stable branch. Use the 1.0 or even 1.1 if you want more stability.

  • https/cookie problems (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hughk ( 248126 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @07:42AM (#4783305) Journal
    Mozilla's most serious bug is a show stopper for eCommerce and that is it sometimes refuses to allow access to cookies under https.

    An important reason to use Mozilla is security. An important concern for anyone trying eCommerce on the web is security. eCommerce web sites often use cookies and they should use https.

    The bug is reported in Bugzilla [mozilla.org] but it appears that some people can circumvent this with script preferences. Regrettably I can't. See also the slashdot thread [slashdot.org] from the original 1.2 announcement here.

    I have kept my 1.1 installation under Linux and still have IE under Win 2K.

  • Maybe they should start releasing SPs!

  • OSS Bug Jumping vs Commercial (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30, 2002 @08:33AM (#4783348)
    It's really sad to see advocates of Windows/Microsoft jumping on every bug in OSS. Surely, we [OSS developers, users, lovers] criticize the downsides of commercial, closed-source software - but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we".
    Surely we are all human and we make mistakes - commercial programmers do and those who do it in their spare time. I don't like closed-source either, but that is, because I can't go edit the source if theres something strange going on and maybe aid the developer hunting that down.

    OSS is about something totally different, that is, _contribution_, fun and a good feeling to help others.
    Most of us aren't elitists who cry "foul", when someone is actually using Windows, be it to play a game or use Excel (imho the only good programm of MS). But we don't hesitate to explain users when they are expiriencing the typical down-sides how this would be totally different with Linux/....

    I have contributed to mplayer (that DVD-key-caching-patch) and it's a wonderful feeling to know that you made the life of other users as well better and easier. A friend of mine did the "devfs" support - and it's a great feeling knowing all you around the world enjoy this.
    • "It's really sad to see advocates of Windows/Microsoft jumping on every bug in OSS. Surely, we [OSS developers, users, lovers] criticize the downsides of commercial, closed-source software - but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we"."

      Erm, is there another Slashdot site out there I dont know about?? I dont feel the need to post links to prove my point, one just has to go through Slashdot archives to prove otherwise to your argument.

    • Re:OSS Bug Jumping vs Commercial (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @01:14PM (#4784117) Homepage
      but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we".

      Hello? For years when IE was still in its infancy, every bug was celebrated and shown as "proof of incompetency" on Microsoft's part.

      Even now every time a severe bug is found in Microsoft /.ers celebrate like a bunch of immature teenagers, fogetting that OSS is not going to succeed because how bad the competition is, but because how good a given OSS is.

  • Mozilla as AOL/TW corporate initiative...? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nazgul000 ( 545727 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @10:38AM (#4783656) Journal
    Caveat: I use Mozilla as my primary browser. That said, I'd like to make this observation:

    It seems to me that we spend a lot of time on Slashdot talking about Mozilla as a premiere project of the open source community. However, my impression is that Mozilla is largely still an internal project of Netscape (and by extension of AOL Time Warner). This impression is based on, among other things, the very large number of @netscape.com email addresses that pervade Bugzilla, the mozilla.org web site, etc. I can't believe that Netscape's engineers restrict themselves to working solely on their release branch of the Mozilla codebase during working hours.

    I don't think it at all diminishes the magnitude of the Mozilla project's achievement to say that it has made progress largely under the aegis of AOL/TW. But we should at least be honest that Mozilla is furthering the agenda of a very large corporation that is just as rapacious and profit-motivated as Microsoft.

    Anyone have any hard data about the investment that AOL has made in Mozilla development?
    • Without a doubt, Netscape has been the largest single contributor to the Mozilla project. Of course, they want to see Mozilla (and their Netscape branded derivative in particular) succeed. But Netscape does not control the project. Sure, they have their influences with what their developers work on, but there's nothing wrong with that. Outside contributors have their influence of what they work on too.

      You said "Mozilla is furthering the agenda of a very large corporation" which I would agree with. Mozilla furthers the agenda of several other companies as well: OEone [oeone.com], ActiveState [activestate.com], IBM [ibm.com], etc... But Mozilla could not do that alone. If Mozilla has played a part in furthering Netscape's agenda, Netscape has played an even bigger part in furthering Mozilla's agenda. The staff and drivers of mozilla.org try hard to ensure that happens.

      This may not be the best example (there are many others that would suit better) but I was reading bug 7 0 7 4 6 at the time, and figured I would post a few comments from it:

      ------- Additional Comment #13 From Blake Ross 2001-03-20 14:35 -------

      By the way, having sat on these changes for over two weeks (and enduring
      multiple merge conflicts), I'm not particularly interested in waiting until
      someone finds the time to fix the other commercial cases. These changes are
      going to break Alphanumerica and MozDev products also, as well as potentially
      any other xul-based app out there, and while I'm certainly willing to help,
      they're not waiting until every commercial vendor's branch is ready (such is
      pre-1.0 development).

      ------- Additional Comment #17 From David Hyatt 2001-03-20 16:21 -------

      Blake, I feel your pain, but I work for Netscape, and therefore can't approve a
      patch that will bust up the commercial tree.

      Are there any volunteers to convert the rest of commercial (outside of AIM)? I
      would do it myself, but this kind of bug just kills my hands.

      ------- Additional Comment #18 From Mike Shaver 2001-03-20 17:05 -------

      Hyatt: acting as module owner, you certainly _can_ permit a change that will
      break a closed source base, especially after the developer (Blake) has gone to
      such reasonable lengths to get someone to fix said closed source base. There
      are lots of other source trees, as Blake points out, that will break because of
      this (in the short term), and he's offered to help with the ones whose authors
      are not actively preventing them from providing such assistance (as is
      Netscape/AOL, in this case). We held off until 0.8.1 to minimize the pain of
      this checkin, and the time has come to bear what pain remains.

      If you don't feel that your employer will let you fulfill your
      Mozilla-module-owner responsibilities, please let us know, because that's the
      kind of problem that we have to solve quickly.

      ------- Additional Comment #19 From Brendan Eich 2001-03-20 17:42 -------

      Module owners whose employers pay them to keep commercial add-ons working along
      with their Mozilla modules have to wear two hats: one for their employer, one
      for Mozilla. If there's a conflict, Mozilla wins, or we need a new module owner
      (at least _pro tem_). Life's rough. Let's get these changes landed.

      It sounds like all but Mac builds have been tested in any case. True?

      /be
  • We've discovered a bug in Mozilla 1.2 that can cause DHTML on some sites to fail. We plan to release Mozilla 1.2.1 with a fix shortly
    This is what I like to see! This is why Open Source is a very good thing... They discovered there was a bug.... They officially announced that they will be releasing a patch soon... If I can make an educated guess I probably would say a patch would be out by Monday or Tuesday...

    The point I am trying to make...Companies or groups of developers that are not obsessed on how much money they make with there code are more likely to take pride in what they do and patch exploits or bugs really quickly...

    It has been proven hasn't it?
  • Just another quick comment...

    Tell me what you would rather have... A company that hired its own Quality Assurance team and kept all bugs they found quiet...Or a mass audience from all over the world testing the software and reporting what they find?

    With that being said... There really isn't any other way for the Mozilla team to let there mass audience "or shall we say...testers" know that they found a bug and that it will be patched soon?

    And would you people stop comparing Mozilla to IE... IE has its own set of troubles... Let it fail on its own...

  • There are a lot more bugs than that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sivar ( 316343 ) <charlesnburns[@]gmail...com> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @01:39PM (#4784185)
    I use Mozilla in Windows 2000 and Gentoo Linux. I haven't had any major problems with the Linux release (though the announced DHTML bug is in both), but the Windows release has been buggy as hell. This in contrast to 1.1 which was only somewhat buggy.

    - It forgets the previous pages visited every so often,

    - Every 10th or so time I visit a page, it announces "The entry point @113WINAPAITSP@@% was not found in [some DLL file]",

    - It randomely decides to ignore the mouse wheel, the keyboard, or the mouse altogether, but recovers if I switch to another window and use that device,

    - It places some banner ads in the middle of a page. For example, on the StorageReview.com, the bottom banner is often smack dab in the middle of the last message in any given forum thread,

    - It reports all downloaded images, be they 200 bytes or 5MB, as "1K" in the download manager,

    - It decides that some files are text files, whether they are or not, and insists on displaying them in the browser rather than downloading them. RAR archives and PNG images do not look good in a web browser window. This bug has been present in many versions and is ignored Bugzilla, with claims that it is the website telling Mozilla what MIME type the file is. Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.

    Bitch, bitch, moan, moan. The Mozilla team is still doing an excellent job making the world's most powerful browser suite. I do, however, hope they run releases through a bit more QA before the next release.

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