Mozilla Updates Firefox To Appease FarmVille Users 220
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.'"
Need for more varied beta testers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
farmvill players are like sarah palin endorsements (Score:2, Insightful)
if they're needed to win, I don't mind losing. But that's why I'm not in business. Or politics.
Technology outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
Behold, decades of networking research and painstaking software development has brought us to this moment--watering tomatoes on a website.
Re:Technology outcome (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Also affects Flash developers (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of having a simple dialog box one has to wade through the about:config for an obscure setting? Really?
Re:So much for the idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation needed.
Re:Also affects Flash developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Some types of complex applications are just not possible in HTML5, and even if they were, wouldn't be available to 50%+ of our users (eg people using IE). So the only solution if we want to get our product to market today, is to use Flash. Believe me, I hate Flash ad banners and crappy Flash navigation websites as much as the next guy. But when you're doing an advance online collaboration application, your only choices are pretty much Java, Silverlight, or Flash. And for various reasons, Flash sucks the least out of all three of them.
When HTML5 is sufficient and has the marketshare to do what we want, I'll be right up there with RMS trying to port my apps to it, but it's just not the reality today.
tl;dr; sorry for feeding the trolls.
Re:Compatibility is a dangerous trap (Score:4, Insightful)
Extending this reasoning, if any website takes too long to load, Firefox should simply close the tab, and tell the user that the website has crashed? I guess you're right, that would definitely put pressure on web developers to make sure their sites loaded fast enough to not get rejected by Firefox...but I think this heavy-handed approach is the wrong way to go about it. Pop up a dialog telling the user that XYZ is going too slow, the plugin is hanging, and would you like to kill it? This will let them know why their PC is going slow, but still giving them the choice to continue if they wish. I thought choice was the whole reason people like Firefox, Open Source, etc.
Re:Also affects Flash developers (Score:3, Insightful)
It was a suggestion to a developer. Developers shouldn't have a problem editing about:config to put the browser in flash-debug mode.
Re:Technology outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who spent quite a bit of time tending a virtual lemonade stand on an Apple ][, I'd have to say this isn't a new trend!
Re:what's FarmVille doing? (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that you were using a MacBook Pro. Apple refuses to allow Adobe to write the Flash player properly for OSX, so an inferior product is a result.
It's funny how Apple purports itself to be an open platform while being exceedingly hostile towards developers. Even Microsoft gives away their compilers for free (including .NET). Apple requires you to pay for a development license to write for their platform. Palm (now HP) not only lets you choose to run unsigned code on WebOS, the SDK is freely available, AND you can modify the internal apps to suit your needs and desires.
Re:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:4, Insightful)
While my initial reaction was along the lines of "Fuck Farmville", on second thought I want it to work.
If it doesn't, then the hordes of zombies playing it go back to IE, and that particular nightmare will never end. Imagine your favorite corporate internal system not getting upgraded just because some middle manager couldn't grow virtual corn anymore.
Re:Oblig... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because zynga games are quite often malware in disguise. It's probably something to do with zynga's sloppy coding combined with the fact that their applications all try to push their advertising crap onto your machine in a covert way. Firefox is working as intended.
I realize that you aren't complaining here, but your post almost reads like "My antivirus keeps trying to delete all these viruses I downloaded".
Re:I made this while you were playing FarmVille (Score:3, Insightful)
So instead of playing harmless games like Farmville, or watching TV to relax, we should be making the latest and greatest burning-man rejects? No thanks. Playing Farmville has exactly as much value as your ridiculous car, and wastes a lot less money and resources to do it. There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours. Some would say you were wasting your time building art cars when you could be reading the world's great literature, or seeing the best painters, or learning to make music, etc. While you were busy fucking around with your car, the founders of Zynga were busy building a company that makes them ridiculously wealthy while bringing millions of people some enjoyment. And for the record, I have never played Farmville, nor do I have any interest in it, and I probably watch a total of 3-4 hours of TV a week. But I realize my hobbies would seem quite boring or uninspired to some, even though I enjoy them, and I realize mocking others for enjoying something I don't enjoy makes me the asshole wasting his time, not them.
Re:So much for the idea.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So much for the idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
THOSE are the type of people that play FarmVille.
There are about a billion PC users - 900 million or so running Windows.
But only a million Slashdot geeks.
For the alternative browser to maintain traction, the momentum has to come from ordinary users, not the evangelist with his forced conversions.
The evangelist doesn't have that many friends, he meets resistance, he hits a wall, he stalls out.
Re:what's FarmVille doing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Xcode is free. Developing for OS X is free. The Xcode compiler is GCC - that is free. You are talking here about Flash on OS X, not on iOS (where a development licence is $99). Microsoft's .NET is equivalent to XCode - both are free, both can be used for mobile development, but that costs money.
Other third party apps that use flash (XBMC iPlayer plugin being the one I use) on OS X seem to do just fine. On2's flash decoder tat allowed you to test the little embedded flash players it made worked very well (and you could feed it any swf). Microsoft Silverlight actually runs pretty well on my system (I use it for Sky Player) - it's markedly better than Flash at what it does. Are you saying that Apple are preferentially helping Microsoft with their proprietary system while "refusing" to allow Adobe to develop Flash? I call nonsense.
Apple's developer documentation clearly describes the low level frameworks in OS X that flash needs - things like the graphics system, for example are well described, including example code. Adobe likes to claim that "needed APIs" are "hidden" but this is clearly not the case - why is it only Adobe that is having this issue?
No, the real issue seems to be that Flash just plain sucks on anything that is not Windows because the code is poor. The 10.1 beta of Flash was *much much* better (and this was before hardware accelerated h.264) on OS X, so whatever they did between 10.0 and 10.1 (and the access to the internals of OS X remained totally unchanged during that time) they improved it enormously. It's still terrible, but it's at least more useable now.
Of course Adobe is going to blame Apple. Are they going to blame Linus for "refusing to allow them to write the flash player properly" in Linux? It's not like that code is private. Why does the Linux flash player suck so much compared to the Windows one if that is the case? The conclusion you will likely reach is that they don;t care enough about it to make it decent - a situation that was true on OS X until recently when Apple said "ok, no flash on the iPhone, it sucks" and Adobe realised they had better pull their thumb out and improve the Mac version. Marketing can explain away all the sudden performance gains in the newer versions as "Apple coming to their senses and helping us out by exposing needed APIs".
Apple has done nothing of the sort - they are already "exposed", and have been for a very long time.
Re:Also affects Flash developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Implying that being a developer means you know every single option in about:config
Implying that Flash developers lack the requisite brain cells to look it up on a search engine.
You might be on to something there.