5 ms·

Come on now! "a peculiar interpreted code" crashes your interpreter and you blame those that (allegedly) auto generated it? I realise there is a bit of tongue i

Come on now! "a peculiar interpreted code" crashes your interpreter and you blame those that (allegedly) auto generated it? I realise there is a bit of tongue in cheek in there and Firefox is an amazing product, but although it's certainly not normal for a function to declare 20k variables it is not outside the realm of the language. Furthermore, 20k is not that much if you take the amounts of RAM current devices have. Don't get me wrong. I don't think assigning blame is the most important thing to do when troubleshooting. I'd rather not, but when that process starts it should be factual. So, sorry, its not Google's fault... Then we also throw Linux under the bus. "it's not our code, it's Linus" here is the code. But, that Linux kernel code that kills a process if it accesses too far from it's stack pointer has the following comment: "Accessing the stack below %sp is always a bug (...)" I haven't got time to look at the history how it was changed and why in the Linux kernel and it became "not a bug". If someone knows more, please do explain. So is it a "bug in Firefox" Or "bug in old Linux"? I can't say with absolute certainty without researching how exactly the stack allocation in old Linux kernel works, how is it documented etc. So if anything I'd thank Google for exposing the bug ;-) On a side note, I've recently experienced a similar JS/firefox/web site bug. There is this open-source ecommerce software called shopware. They use symfony (yes, PHP i know...) and the most recent major version simply freezes Firefox when one goes to the admin interface and looses connectivity. Not just freezing one tab, no, freezes entire Firefox, multiple open windows. This is on up to date Arch with a new Linux kernel so it's definitely not this issue,but it does happen in Firefox and not in Chrome. JavaScript bugs like this are hard to find. I think AI may be one tool that will help us find them faster (intentionally or not).

outwit 3y ago
It does seem to me that Google is intentionally refusing to test their websites in anything other than Chrome. Even without AI... It can afford to pay a handful of people to test in Firefox and Safari. But will it?
- db48x 3y ago
  To be fair this crash is only happening with older kernels. I wouldn’t expect them to test their website in every version of Firefox running on every version of the Linux kernel. Not even Mozilla does that.
jacquesm 3y ago
No, it's Google's fault. You test for compatibility if you serve 100's of millions of users with all major browsers, including those of your competitors.
- Roark66 3y ago
  If a tab crashed I would be sympathetic to this point of view, but the entire browser is killed. So no, it's not google's fault in my book. As for testing. Really, you expect them to test against Linux Kernel 4? If so, how about 2 as well? Just in case you didn't realise. Kernel 4.20 (the one that changes this behaviour so it wouldn't show the Firefox bug) was released in December 2018. That's 4.5 years ago.
  - rvz 3y ago
    Exactly. That's even worse since the entire browser is crashing. Its not Google's fault if Firefox was unable to prevent a crash or display the page when Safari, Chrome, etc can load and run it without crashing. Once the user sees this crash constantly, switches to Chrome and it doesn't crash, then they blame the crashing browser which is Firefox. Rightly so. Really says a lot about these Firefox developers and users immediately blaming Google for their JS code when Firefox was supposed to protect or handle against cases like this without crashing.
    - db48x 3y ago
      Mozilla isn’t blaming Google here, or they wouldn’t have bothered to fix the bug. When you drill down to the root cause of something, you have to carefully note down all the proximate causes that you found along the way, otherwise you won’t have a complete understanding of the problem. In particular, noticing that Google’s machine–generated javascript is doing something allowed but out of the ordinary is important for explaining why you only just now found out about this bug in code that has been working just fine for years.
- db48x 3y ago
  Notice that this only crashes on an out–of–date kernel. No matter how much money Google has, you cannot expect them to test their websites in every combination of browser and kernel version. Not even on a handful of carefully–selected kernel versions. Maybe Mozilla should test Firefox on more kernel versions (an argument could perhaps be made for testing the older kernels from various distros with long–term support, for instance), but really the whole reason Firefox has crash reporting is to catch the really weird combinations that happen in real life but are hard to continuously test for.

outwit 3y ago

It does seem to me that Google is intentionally refusing to test their websites in anything other than Chrome. Even without AI... It can afford to pay a handful of people to test in Firefox and Safari. But will it?

db48x 3y ago
To be fair this crash is only happening with older kernels. I wouldn’t expect them to test their website in every version of Firefox running on every version of the Linux kernel. Not even Mozilla does that.

jacquesm 3y ago

No, it's Google's fault. You test for compatibility if you serve 100's of millions of users with all major browsers, including those of your competitors.

Roark66 3y ago
If a tab crashed I would be sympathetic to this point of view, but the entire browser is killed. So no, it's not google's fault in my book. As for testing. Really, you expect them to test against Linux Kernel 4? If so, how about 2 as well? Just in case you didn't realise. Kernel 4.20 (the one that changes this behaviour so it wouldn't show the Firefox bug) was released in December 2018. That's 4.5 years ago.
- rvz 3y ago
  Exactly. That's even worse since the entire browser is crashing. Its not Google's fault if Firefox was unable to prevent a crash or display the page when Safari, Chrome, etc can load and run it without crashing. Once the user sees this crash constantly, switches to Chrome and it doesn't crash, then they blame the crashing browser which is Firefox. Rightly so. Really says a lot about these Firefox developers and users immediately blaming Google for their JS code when Firefox was supposed to protect or handle against cases like this without crashing.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Mozilla isn’t blaming Google here, or they wouldn’t have bothered to fix the bug. When you drill down to the root cause of something, you have to carefully note down all the proximate causes that you found along the way, otherwise you won’t have a complete understanding of the problem. In particular, noticing that Google’s machine–generated javascript is doing something allowed but out of the ordinary is important for explaining why you only just now found out about this bug in code that has been working just fine for years.
db48x 3y ago
Notice that this only crashes on an out–of–date kernel. No matter how much money Google has, you cannot expect them to test their websites in every combination of browser and kernel version. Not even on a handful of carefully–selected kernel versions. Maybe Mozilla should test Firefox on more kernel versions (an argument could perhaps be made for testing the older kernels from various distros with long–term support, for instance), but really the whole reason Firefox has crash reporting is to catch the really weird combinations that happen in real life but are hard to continuously test for.