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.
Re:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:4, Funny)
Of she would not have helped in this case, she is far to savvy to waste her time with FarmVille.
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So your wife suspected you of having generated several massive nuclear explosions above ground to generate EMPs? Wow, she must think you're really bad ass!
Re:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg [youtube.com]
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Thanks for the link that was hilarious. +5, Funny.
Re:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:4, Funny)
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What sucks is, for some reason 3.6.6 is preventing me from watching videos on youtube and such *ahem*. Damn you Mozilla!
YT works fine for me - though I do seem to have to push the play button on some videos (but I suspect that is because more people are setting their videos not to autoplay).
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check noscript
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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:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Need for more varied beta testers (Score:4, Funny)
So the real problem here was a shitty implementation of FarmVille.
Well, I, for one, am shocked.
So much for the idea.... (Score:5, Funny)
That Firefox users were smarter internet users.
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The farmville players can be intelligent people, but for gaming have a simplictic blurry oriented option, that the gamers need to understand and respect.
And the devs make the right decision fixing a bug that affect a lot of users.
Re:So much for the idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation needed.
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a bug ? Wasn't it simply an overzealous protection ? Which is viewed as fine by also a lot of users anyway, who don't want flash / adobe reader to waste their cpu cycles ?
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Re:So much for the idea.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That Firefox users were smarter internet users.
No, see a couple of years ago the smarter internet users started installing Firefox for their computer-illiterate friends and family to get them away from IE.
THOSE are the type of people that play FarmVille.
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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.
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Even my GF who frankly thinks games are a waste of time ended up hooked on Farmville and that treasure hunting game they have on FB.
She thinks that games are a waste of time, but makes an exception for Farmville of all things?!
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You may not have seen it, but Sims was both the best selling game at the time, and the only to reach a 1:1 ratio in on female:male.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You cut a guy's balls off and pump him full of estrogen, and he'll probably want to go shopping.
This is a courtesy notification that I am unsubscribing from your newsletter.
Not able to play Farmville? (Score:2)
No, seriously
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smarter, maybe... but the smart ones use Opera. :>
Oblig... (Score:5, Funny)
"It's a *Feature*.
Re:Oblig... (Score:5, Funny)
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"Sorry Dave, allowing you to play Farmville would be unproductive."
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Firefox has fits with Zynga games in general. I'm not sure how much of
it is due to the stock configuration and how much of it is due to my
extra paranoid addons. However, Firefox quite often complains about
various security problems with Zynga games.
This doesn't surprise me in the least.
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".
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.
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Except that this wasn't just isolated to Farmville players.
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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.
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Behold, decades of networking research and painstaking software development has brought us to this moment--watering tomatoes on a website.
And that's not going to change until you start wiring stuff into/altering people's brains.
Luster Leaf Rapiclip Foam Wire Tie [amazon.com]. If it's great for tender tomatoes, I'm sure it'll work quite well for soft brains as well.
Back to the stone age? (Score:2)
Or more accurately: centuries of technological advances has brought us full cycle, except this time we are growing food we can't eat!?
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It's that, or "watering" your own keyboard because of the things you see on a website...
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!
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Did you play the version Apple distributed with their computers? I loved that game back when, and it was actually educational.
Re:Technology outcome (Score:4, Informative)
Play some more here [virtualapple.org]. ;)
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That reminds me of another Apple ][ text game where you had to sell tickets for the school play and you could allocate your funds in different ways to help sell more tickets. One day I found out that you could order negative quantities of supplies and your account would be credited rather than debited. You could make millions without selling any tickets at all :)
Re:Technology outcome (Score:5, Informative)
I assume that you've seen the Farmville parody video [youtube.com] that's been circulating for a while. Definitely worth checking out if you've got a couple of spare minutes. Had me in stitches.
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Because I'm sure the games you like to play are *far* deeper.
On the bright side, technology today gives snobs the opportunity to bitch to the world about the use of said technology...
Also affects Flash developers (Score:5, Informative)
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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How bout the 'dom.ipc.plugins' entries in the about:config page
That's what they are there for.
I didn't even have to google for this, I just went to about:config, searched for plugin, and BAM.
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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?
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It was a suggestion to a developer. Developers shouldn't have a problem editing about:config to put the browser in flash-debug mode.
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Developers shouldn't have a problem editing about:config to put the browser in flash-debug mode.
Implying that being a developer means you know every single option in about:config. Sure, once the setting is pointed out then yes it shouldn't be a problem to edit it. The issue is that it's almost impossible to know all the options and what they do within about:config.
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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.
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:Also affects Flash developers (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?
Flash can't be both (Score:3, Informative)
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"?
So farmville suddenly became a priority huh? :) (Score:2)
Now we know what the mozilla guys are doing while their code is compiling... harvesting crops!
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Actually we know the opposite, that none of the FF developers play Farmville. If they did the problem never would have made it into the wild.
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Actually we know the opposite, that none of the FF developers play Farmville. If they did the problem never would have made it into the wild.
Then again, neither would the update....
No Bug, Artificial Intelligence at work. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't Hit Me! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't Hit Me! (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to work for a large Honda Dealership, assigning loan cars for people while theirs is serviced. While their car is bought around from parking I learned that some played Farmville. Others were in no mood for chat. I have seen grown(mainly women) scream like lunatics while they wait an extra 10 minutes till a car is sorted. One time when one didnt have cup holders, she threw the keys on the ground(complete with disabler alarm built in), and smashed them with her heel.
This is the farmville demographic.
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And the obsessive ones are the ones more likely to behave as you say.
Where was 3.6.5? (Score:2)
Why is this release numbered 3.6.6 and not 3.6.5(which is 0.0.1 more than the previous release)?
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This is a UI issues (Score:2)
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.
Compatibility is a dangerous trap (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
what's FarmVille doing? (Score:3)
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?
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That is all part of the plan. It's co-developed by intel.
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Or maybe its just flash with a visual basic plugin controller.
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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
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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.
Your argument makes a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that Adobe's flash performs as bad or worse on platforms that are demonstrably more open than Windows.
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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 (a
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The research which came out today showed that the difference in performance was on the order of 30%. I have played plenty of other Flash games that didn't have this problem. "Apple hates Adobe" or "Adobe hates Apple" are insufficient explanations for why what is essentially a Super Nintendo game in terms of complexity runs like ass on a platform that's at least three orders of magnitude faster.
You might not like Macs, but if Flash always ran like this, nobody would use it.
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I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my
I've never played Farmville, but most crappy Flash performance is Flash developers who poll for input (bad) instead of setting up callbacks (good).
I'd love to blame Adobe, but it's not really Flash's fault that people can write code like: "while(true){waitforinput();}" You can write that shitty code in almost every language.
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Wow, good job with that less-than sign, Slashdot. Well, you get the gist of the reply.
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I run Ubuntu on a Mac, does that still make it a toy? What exactly defines the toyness? The OS? The hardware?
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It's common knowledge that the porn industry optimizes better than the rest of the tech industry.
I made this while you were playing FarmVille (Score:3, Interesting)
See also this Good Samaritan Cartoon [cagle.com]:
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."
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Awesome car.
I'd be out doing the same thing instead of watching television IF my car hobby would become as affordable as $60 a month and a grand or so every 10 years when a TV releases the magic smoke. Until then, boob toob it is.
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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
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I have to disagree. That car is definitely more interesting than someone playing farmville.
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Let us know when we can join you.
Right after you turn off the TV, presumably.
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Where is 3.6.5? (Score:2)
Off topic I know... (Score:4, Funny)
f your crops (Score:2)
Shutting Down FarmVille (Score:2)
Sounds more like a feature then a bug to me.
Re:Why is the time fixed? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think terminating the plugin automatically is the wrong choice. If JavaScript takes too long, they don't terminate it, but instead ask the user if they want to keep running or terminate. One has to wonder why they give more leeway to applications written in JavaScript than applications written in ActionScript, seeing as how either one is just as capable of hanging your browser.
Notably, Chrome gives you the same popup dialog for both JS applications and plugins. My guess is Firefox devs are more anti-Flash, and don't mind killing it, and only relented when they realized how many of their userbase they might lose when they start interfering with people's Farmville addictions.
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Or just ask on a per-instance basis. "plugin not responding, kill it or wait longer?"
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It picks some arbitrary value because the browser is not psychic. It can't tell the difference between a plugin which is dead and one which is unresponsive. So it picks some reasonable
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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 l
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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
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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.