15 ms·

Firefox bug gets fixed after 25 years

346 points by claviska 2y ago

p0w3n3d 2y ago
Also Firefox: not passing acid3 test
- Georgelemental 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 > By April 2017, the updated specifications had diverged from the test such that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer pass the test as written. Hickson acknowledges that some aspects of the test were controversial and has written that the test "no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers".
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
> Updated version of patch. r=sfraser@netscape.com Does that domain even exist anymore?
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  Yep. https://www.whois.com/whois/netscape.com https://www.whois.com/whois/netscape.com
johnea 2y ago
I'm still holding hope that thunderbird will actually fetch mail into folders without having to click on them...
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Right click folder, select "Properties", check "When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder."
- tredre3 2y ago
  I agree it's pretty annoying, no idea why they don't check all by default. You can manually change the setting for each folder (righ click -> properties) or: https://manage.dihostnet.com/knowledgebase/8/Check-all-IMAP-folders-for-new-messages.html https://manage.dihostnet.com/knowledgebase/8/Check-all-IMAP-...
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    It's half the solution. If you reply to an email in your inbox, the sent email won't often show up in thread until the Sent folder is updated. Either by clicking on the Sent folder, or waiting for the next auto-check.
izoow 2y ago
I wish the bug where the copy option is randomly greyed out even though there is text to copy got finally fixed. It's been driving me insane.
- robotnikman 2y ago
  Glad to know I'm not the only one experiencing this
  - hedora 2y ago
    I also wish there was a way to disable the “disable paste” feature. Worst case, if there is bizarre breakage due to frameworks that reinvent text boxes, have a keyboard shortcut or menu item to type the clipboard contents at 300 characters per minute.
    - kbrosnan 2y ago
      Ctrl + right click may allow you to work around it.
    - BizarroLand 2y ago
      There are some extensions that can help with that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=enable%20copy%20paste https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=enable%20... Specifically: Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy I would prefer of course that the underlying issue get resolved, but in lieu this has been an excellent workaround for my needs.
- EmuAGR 2y ago
  Let's see if it gets fixed in less than 25 years. Mozilla is sometimes too slow by today's fast-paced web environment.
yownie 2y ago
[flagged]
eddd-ddde 2y ago
Hoping they do XDG next. Also been waiting for 20 years [1] [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356
- shmerl 2y ago
  Yep, looking forward to that one!
- zbowling 2y ago
  I don't think XDG base dir will ever be fully and universally adopted. It's been years (21 years to be exact). If it wasn't for Arch Linux getting hostile to programs that don't follow (like locking permissions of the root user directory), it probably wouldn't have grown as much as it has recently to what it is now because, honestly, the spec is not actively solving real problems people have. Most of the adoption is happening because people are getting cranky about their $HOME directory layout enough that they are annoying enough to bully maintainers into supporting it, but 99% of users don't give a damn if the program follows XDG base dir or not. It's just making the things arguably "cleaner" according to freedesktop from a spec that hasn't gained wide adoption over 20 years. I, however, don't like the loosy goosy config/data/cache split like they have it and the implied intent because not everything falls into those buckets and then you don't know the behavior of some system thing (is Dameon going to wipe my cache? are users going to copy the config folder around? what gets backed up exactly?) There is no standard for how the folders are really treated in the spec. Intentionally vague but possibly vague in ways that will break things if people make assumptions. It's like the /usr split from the root. or /usr/local from the root. Or /opt. Left overs from a bygone era that seem to stick around. Trying to create yet another. I reluctantly support it in our product, but only when those ENVs are explicitly set, and I 100% ignore XDG's behavior and what it says should be the default on every linux system when it's not set because it's not what other UNIX variants like MacOS expect. Just enough to keep the Arch Linux zealots from flooding our bug tracker each week, literally demanding we adopt it when they account for less than 1% of users. It's hard enough with docs to let users know where to find their files from our product on their system because users don't know what XDG is all the time and XDG for most is not the established convention they expect already. Frankly, there is too much legacy with trying to move everyone over to this spec, especially when it isn't driving some real compelling value for anyone except for folks who want a pristine user directory. Honestly, we should rethink it entirely and move to a container-based solution where our desktop apps can't escape their little jails (almost like snap apps). Maybe learn from NIX a bit. Admit defeat that will ever get every linux user app in the world to care and adopt XDG base dir (or even user dir). It's hard enough we are supporting Mac and Windows ports that don't follow this behavior. Get away from the UNIX permission model of running the programs under the user and run each program under it's own uid. It's now android works.
paol 2y ago
Ha! I was subscribed to this bug for most of those 25 years. Note that Firefox didn't exist at the time, this was filed against Netscape Navigator. Don't remember why I was subscribed to the bug, must have commented on it or something. Got the occasional email notification about it over the years, always got a chuckle out of it. Then a couple of days ago, lo and behold, it was fixed!
- robin_reala 2y ago
  Me too: I remember, when I was first toying with the idea of building websites as a career, being fascinated by the idea of having a web site where the background was transparent or translucent down to the desktop behind. I always figured you should be able to do something like html { background: transparent; } and have it just work. It’s worth pointing out that this bug fix doesn’t actually do that. For a start, it’s a preference that can be toggled on by the user or an extension, rather than a default thing that websites can choose. Probably for the best: it’d certainly open up new avenues for clickjacking.
- playingalong 2y ago
  Next should be Jira's ticket about versions across projects.
  - b112 2y ago
    Wonder if others had the same local names, Nutscape and Internet Exploder.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  I find it amazing that your subscription to that bug thread survived all those years. Wow!
  - bombcar 2y ago
    I have a few bugs that are almost ready to go off to college, and I get an email about once a year from various machinations involving them.
mmastrac 2y ago
Firefox's Bugzilla is certainly one of the oldest running bug trackers. I'm impressed at how much of the original feel of the bug tracker is still around after all these revisions. It was a pretty hairy, monstrous codebase back in the day. At one point in 2000 (?) I stood up an instance in our Windows dev shop to replace a home-grown bugtracker built on Microsoft Access/Outlook. It was complex but pretty much one of the best-of-breed bugtrackers for some time. I think that FogBugz was just getting started around then, and those guys were one of the first teams to really consider user experience.
- db48x 2y ago
  Even today it is hard to beat Bugzilla. In fact, some of the choices available today are so much worse than Bugzilla that I cannot even fathom how they exist. As an example, Dwarf Fortress uses Mantis BT, which is just awful. On the other hand, FogBugz is one that I have always wanted to try if I ever got the chance.
  - aitchnyu 2y ago
    Whoa, Fogbugz was sold off to a new buyer and Glitch is the only major product in Fog Creek's hands.
    - brcmthrowaway 2y ago
      They got FU money
  - augusto-moura 2y ago
    I used Mantis on a private project before, and although the UI is a bit on the ugly side and quite outdated, everything worked as expected and it did a pretty decent job at what it promised
mg 2y ago
The one long term open bug that irks me the most is that you cannot properly date-format the x-axis of scatter plots in LibreOffice: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54132 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54132 12 years old. According to the comments, fixing it is discouraged as the code is so "horribly complicated", it would likely cause regressions.
- bluSCALE4 2y ago
  Gotta love it when maintainers are afraid of code they allowed to get merged in.
  - perlgeek 2y ago
    Could have been previous maintainers that allowed it, and now the current maintainers are stuck with it.
  - smaudet 2y ago
    Maintainers often change (leave/die/hired out/new job). What one maintainer knew and understood, is often fairy dust/spaghetti to another.
    - apitman 2y ago
      And skill level can vary vastly from one maintainer to the next. I suspect this will become a more and more significant problem as time goes on.
    - arp242 2y ago
      Looks like there was quite a bit of attrition in the early 2010s after Oracle stopped developing their commercial version (and presumably stopped hiring the developers). There's also been people who stuck around, but this was probably a pretty big knowledge drain. See e.g. https://gitstats.arp242.net/LibreOffice/ https://gitstats.arp242.net/LibreOffice/
- sha16 2y ago
  This does not bode well for my hopes of LibreOffice getting my favorite features from Excel.
_ink_ 2y ago
That's awesome! 28-03-2000 is not 25 years ago, tho.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- XlA5vEKsMISoIln 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kome 2y ago
    what do you mean?
  - hu3 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Tomte 2y ago
      Germany uses DD.MM.YY(YY). Dashes are for weirdos like me, and only for ISO dates, never DD-MM-YYYY.
      - hu3 2y ago
        It's more about the order DD MM YYYY than the separators.
        bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Hard disagree. The separator choice implies different ordering to me and to many others.
        OJFord 2y ago
        Ok what's 2/8/24 in words?
timetraveller26 2y ago
That bug is older than half the audience here... Probably?
- hadlock 2y ago
  no
jcuenod 2y ago
It warms the cockles of my heart to see this kind of thing. Happened to me recently with a 24 year old firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62151 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62151
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  Fuck, I remember being stumped by this
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related from last August: Happy 25th Birthday to Bugzilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37279543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37279543
pelagicAustral 2y ago
5 more years than what Phil Leotardo spend in the can, and 7 more than what it took to get a file picker thumbnail in Gnome.
thefaux 2y ago
Sounds like maybe they should rewrite firefox in rust.
vortico 2y ago
Why so many posts about Firefox bugs getting fixed after N years? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox+bug+years https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox+bug+years
- sgerenser 2y ago
  I think people are amazed and impressed that bugs more than 6 months old aren't just auto-closed with "There's been several new versions since this bug was filed, please check if this still exists on the latest version, and if so file a new bug."
frankfrank13 2y ago
> Closed: 24 years ago → 6 hours ago
Xenoamorphous 2y ago
Off topic but I really dislike the trend of using “human readable durations” like “a month ago”, just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. Outlook (Mac version at least) is the worst offender. For emails prior to the current day it will say for example just “yesterday” and it will only show you the time if you click on the email. I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless.
- gravescale 2y ago
  If you have your system time wrong somehow, GitLab will happily tell you a bug fix was closed in 4 hours' time.
- perilunar 2y ago
  > just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. But use ISO 8601 or a month name FFS — dd/mm or mm/dd is not always obvious.
- latexr 2y ago
  Hover over the date to see the exact day and time.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Gitlab shows this relative date. I repeatedly have this issue where I'm trying to look through commits and I have to mouse over every single commit repeatedly while trying to figure out when something was changed in relation to other changes. So I mouse over one, mouse over the next, go back to the previous one, forget what the other one was, mouse over that, then mouse over a fourth and repeat. Who came up with this insane bullshit? It'll show me a bunch of commits all made 4 days ago. I have no idea what day that was. Was it Monday? Wednesday? I have logs from the 16th, does Gitlab think that was 4 days ago or 5?
  - jvdvegt 2y ago
    Hover? I'm on mobile...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
postepowanieadm 2y ago
Textareas are so overlooked, they feel really like 1990s, yet there is no real alternative with spellchecking and os integration.
ece 2y ago
BugBot was on to something: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33654#c190 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33654#c190 "The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 27 duplicates, 103 votes and 91 CCs. :emilio, could you consider increasing the bug severity? For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation."
ayewo 2y ago
On a related note, starting today, I noticed that x.com (fka Twitter.com) is no longer working in Firefox. I get the following error: > Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. > Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com
- pyb 2y ago
  Same here. This also happened about a week ago, but was reverted/fixed within a few hours. So, I'm hoping Twitter will fix this.
- jraph 2y ago
  Only very remotely related if you squint hard enough though, no? (sorry for sounding a bit rude, not my intention, I would like to read friendly but I can't find a nice way to point this out and still want to do it - it's just that I wouldn't find it very enjoyable if all HNers started commenting about general / random issues they encountered on some product P in a submission about a specific/historical issue in P - I'm sure we all encountered some issue while using Firefox / any browser at least once, especially with Twitter which screams buggy to me as a distant observer, I remember consistently having to try and refresh pages several times a few years ago to display a 140 character tweet - awful experience)
  - ayewo 2y ago
    Well, x.com was working completely fine on my version of Firefox until yesterday so it’s an intentional breakage for Firefox users. My comment was more of a PSA to other Firefox users who are likely the ones also reading about the bug fix here, so it’s definitely on-topic. I guess you disagree which is fine. If they don’t fix it, I have to either switch to a different browser or device (mobile) to visit x.com. The good news is I’ll spend less time there.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
There are a few other long running software. What's the longest age of a fixed emacs bug, for instance?
- lordgrenville 2y ago
  Here's one older than the FF one: https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2024-02-10-fixing-a-twenty-six-years-old-emacs-bug.html https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2024-02-10-fixing-a-twenty-six-...
hleszek 2y ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
- luke_warlow 2y ago
  The duplicated bug was where the fix was landed, it was just easier to use a new bug rather than discuss things on the 25 year old bug.
- rurban 2y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1830576 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1830576 was the ticket with the actual fix. This bug had hundreds of duplicates. And finally Chromium, Safari and Firefox came together to fix it.
dist-epoch 2y ago
At least they don't sweep bugs under the rug after 6 months of inactivity as many projects.
- omoikane 2y ago
  I believe the common term for this is "bug bankruptcy". And when teams declare bug bankruptcy too often, it's called "bug insolvency". I have only seen "bug insolvency" once, but "bug bankruptcy" seemed to be commonly used.
suzzer99 2y ago
AWS solves this problem by periodically wiping out old bugs and any mention of them.
- kevincox 2y ago
  The ostrich strategy to avoiding bugs.
johannes1234321 2y ago
With such old bugs I often wonder whether it's not best to simply close them. Few people will browse them and many will be "accidentally" closed by reworking of different subsystems. But if they are still relevant somebody will file it, again. If not reopened it's probably not a problem anymore.
- largehotcoffee 2y ago
  I see people say this all the time, it's a harmful bad practice. Don't auto close bug reports after x amount of time.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Bug Wars II: CADT Strikes Back. ;-)
  - jraph 2y ago
    Yeah, jwz might be a bit weird at times but he is right on this. I don't understand what problem closing bugs solves. If you want to close a bug, check if it doesn't reproduce. And if it doesn't reproduce, give the author the chance to confirm. A bug report is documentation. It is valuable. It's a gift. If written well enough of course. If you feel open bug reports clutters your bug tracker, first I would suggest you are watching them from the wrong perspective, and second I would suggest you might need to take advantage of some triage / organization tool (better) like labels or projects. Open issue doesn't mean "planned" or "will look into this". Saying this as a software developer. Who has also been reporting some number of issues. Reporting takes time.
- aeontech 2y ago
  The problem with that is the dismissal of the time investment by the original filer who may have spent a significant amount of time getting reproducible steps, screenshots, and other relevant information into the bug. It treats users' time as free. I think there's a subtle but important distinction between _closing_ the old bugs outright, and leaving them open but marking them as "Verify" with a comment like "we're not sure but it may have been fixed with recent work - can anyone confirm if it's still reproducible?"
dbacar 2y ago
I dont recall we had firefox in 99. Even internet explorer , was it there ? good times.
- kemitche 2y ago
  The bug was originally filed against Netscape Navigator per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431738
- z500 2y ago
  The bug was actually filed just over 24 years ago, and BugZilla rounded up. And back then it was Mozilla before it was Firefox
dyauspitr 2y ago
Holy shit, Firefox has been around for 25 years?
- jgtor 2y ago
  No, this was filed for originally Netscape Navigator which codebase evolved into modern Firefox.
celdon25 2y ago
Feels like my experience waiting for Microsoft or Jetbrains to fix bugs

346 points by claviska 2y ago

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Also Firefox: not passing acid3 test

Georgelemental 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 > By April 2017, the updated specifications had diverged from the test such that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer pass the test as written. Hickson acknowledges that some aspects of the test were controversial and has written that the test "no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers".

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

> Updated version of patch. r=sfraser@netscape.com Does that domain even exist anymore?

jjtheblunt 2y ago
Yep. https://www.whois.com/whois/netscape.com https://www.whois.com/whois/netscape.com

johnea 2y ago

I'm still holding hope that thunderbird will actually fetch mail into folders without having to click on them...

jcranmer 2y ago
Right click folder, select "Properties", check "When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder."
tredre3 2y ago
I agree it's pretty annoying, no idea why they don't check all by default. You can manually change the setting for each folder (righ click -> properties) or: https://manage.dihostnet.com/knowledgebase/8/Check-all-IMAP-folders-for-new-messages.html https://manage.dihostnet.com/knowledgebase/8/Check-all-IMAP-...
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  It's half the solution. If you reply to an email in your inbox, the sent email won't often show up in thread until the Sent folder is updated. Either by clicking on the Sent folder, or waiting for the next auto-check.

izoow 2y ago

I wish the bug where the copy option is randomly greyed out even though there is text to copy got finally fixed. It's been driving me insane.

robotnikman 2y ago
Glad to know I'm not the only one experiencing this
- hedora 2y ago
  I also wish there was a way to disable the “disable paste” feature. Worst case, if there is bizarre breakage due to frameworks that reinvent text boxes, have a keyboard shortcut or menu item to type the clipboard contents at 300 characters per minute.
  - kbrosnan 2y ago
    Ctrl + right click may allow you to work around it.
  - BizarroLand 2y ago
    There are some extensions that can help with that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=enable%20copy%20paste https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=enable%20... Specifically: Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy I would prefer of course that the underlying issue get resolved, but in lieu this has been an excellent workaround for my needs.
EmuAGR 2y ago
Let's see if it gets fixed in less than 25 years. Mozilla is sometimes too slow by today's fast-paced web environment.

yownie 2y ago

[flagged]

eddd-ddde 2y ago

Hoping they do XDG next. Also been waiting for 20 years [1] [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356

shmerl 2y ago
Yep, looking forward to that one!
zbowling 2y ago
I don't think XDG base dir will ever be fully and universally adopted. It's been years (21 years to be exact). If it wasn't for Arch Linux getting hostile to programs that don't follow (like locking permissions of the root user directory), it probably wouldn't have grown as much as it has recently to what it is now because, honestly, the spec is not actively solving real problems people have. Most of the adoption is happening because people are getting cranky about their $HOME directory layout enough that they are annoying enough to bully maintainers into supporting it, but 99% of users don't give a damn if the program follows XDG base dir or not. It's just making the things arguably "cleaner" according to freedesktop from a spec that hasn't gained wide adoption over 20 years. I, however, don't like the loosy goosy config/data/cache split like they have it and the implied intent because not everything falls into those buckets and then you don't know the behavior of some system thing (is Dameon going to wipe my cache? are users going to copy the config folder around? what gets backed up exactly?) There is no standard for how the folders are really treated in the spec. Intentionally vague but possibly vague in ways that will break things if people make assumptions. It's like the /usr split from the root. or /usr/local from the root. Or /opt. Left overs from a bygone era that seem to stick around. Trying to create yet another. I reluctantly support it in our product, but only when those ENVs are explicitly set, and I 100% ignore XDG's behavior and what it says should be the default on every linux system when it's not set because it's not what other UNIX variants like MacOS expect. Just enough to keep the Arch Linux zealots from flooding our bug tracker each week, literally demanding we adopt it when they account for less than 1% of users. It's hard enough with docs to let users know where to find their files from our product on their system because users don't know what XDG is all the time and XDG for most is not the established convention they expect already. Frankly, there is too much legacy with trying to move everyone over to this spec, especially when it isn't driving some real compelling value for anyone except for folks who want a pristine user directory. Honestly, we should rethink it entirely and move to a container-based solution where our desktop apps can't escape their little jails (almost like snap apps). Maybe learn from NIX a bit. Admit defeat that will ever get every linux user app in the world to care and adopt XDG base dir (or even user dir). It's hard enough we are supporting Mac and Windows ports that don't follow this behavior. Get away from the UNIX permission model of running the programs under the user and run each program under it's own uid. It's now android works.

paol 2y ago

Ha! I was subscribed to this bug for most of those 25 years. Note that Firefox didn't exist at the time, this was filed against Netscape Navigator. Don't remember why I was subscribed to the bug, must have commented on it or something. Got the occasional email notification about it over the years, always got a chuckle out of it. Then a couple of days ago, lo and behold, it was fixed!

robin_reala 2y ago
Me too: I remember, when I was first toying with the idea of building websites as a career, being fascinated by the idea of having a web site where the background was transparent or translucent down to the desktop behind. I always figured you should be able to do something like html { background: transparent; } and have it just work. It’s worth pointing out that this bug fix doesn’t actually do that. For a start, it’s a preference that can be toggled on by the user or an extension, rather than a default thing that websites can choose. Probably for the best: it’d certainly open up new avenues for clickjacking.
playingalong 2y ago
Next should be Jira's ticket about versions across projects.
- b112 2y ago
  Wonder if others had the same local names, Nutscape and Internet Exploder.
hypeatei 2y ago
I find it amazing that your subscription to that bug thread survived all those years. Wow!
- bombcar 2y ago
  I have a few bugs that are almost ready to go off to college, and I get an email about once a year from various machinations involving them.

mmastrac 2y ago

Firefox's Bugzilla is certainly one of the oldest running bug trackers. I'm impressed at how much of the original feel of the bug tracker is still around after all these revisions. It was a pretty hairy, monstrous codebase back in the day. At one point in 2000 (?) I stood up an instance in our Windows dev shop to replace a home-grown bugtracker built on Microsoft Access/Outlook. It was complex but pretty much one of the best-of-breed bugtrackers for some time. I think that FogBugz was just getting started around then, and those guys were one of the first teams to really consider user experience.

db48x 2y ago
Even today it is hard to beat Bugzilla. In fact, some of the choices available today are so much worse than Bugzilla that I cannot even fathom how they exist. As an example, Dwarf Fortress uses Mantis BT, which is just awful. On the other hand, FogBugz is one that I have always wanted to try if I ever got the chance.
- aitchnyu 2y ago
  Whoa, Fogbugz was sold off to a new buyer and Glitch is the only major product in Fog Creek's hands.
  - brcmthrowaway 2y ago
    They got FU money
- augusto-moura 2y ago
  I used Mantis on a private project before, and although the UI is a bit on the ugly side and quite outdated, everything worked as expected and it did a pretty decent job at what it promised

mg 2y ago

The one long term open bug that irks me the most is that you cannot properly date-format the x-axis of scatter plots in LibreOffice: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54132 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54132 12 years old. According to the comments, fixing it is discouraged as the code is so "horribly complicated", it would likely cause regressions.

bluSCALE4 2y ago
Gotta love it when maintainers are afraid of code they allowed to get merged in.
- perlgeek 2y ago
  Could have been previous maintainers that allowed it, and now the current maintainers are stuck with it.
- smaudet 2y ago
  Maintainers often change (leave/die/hired out/new job). What one maintainer knew and understood, is often fairy dust/spaghetti to another.
  - apitman 2y ago
    And skill level can vary vastly from one maintainer to the next. I suspect this will become a more and more significant problem as time goes on.
  - arp242 2y ago
    Looks like there was quite a bit of attrition in the early 2010s after Oracle stopped developing their commercial version (and presumably stopped hiring the developers). There's also been people who stuck around, but this was probably a pretty big knowledge drain. See e.g. https://gitstats.arp242.net/LibreOffice/ https://gitstats.arp242.net/LibreOffice/
sha16 2y ago
This does not bode well for my hopes of LibreOffice getting my favorite features from Excel.

_ink_ 2y ago

That's awesome! 28-03-2000 is not 25 years ago, tho.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
XlA5vEKsMISoIln 2y ago
[flagged]
- kome 2y ago
  what do you mean?
- hu3 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Tomte 2y ago
    Germany uses DD.MM.YY(YY). Dashes are for weirdos like me, and only for ISO dates, never DD-MM-YYYY.
    - hu3 2y ago
      It's more about the order DD MM YYYY than the separators.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Hard disagree. The separator choice implies different ordering to me and to many others.
        OJFord 2y ago
        Ok what's 2/8/24 in words?

timetraveller26 2y ago

That bug is older than half the audience here... Probably?

hadlock 2y ago
no

jcuenod 2y ago

It warms the cockles of my heart to see this kind of thing. Happened to me recently with a 24 year old firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62151 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62151

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
Fuck, I remember being stumped by this

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related from last August: Happy 25th Birthday to Bugzilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37279543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37279543

pelagicAustral 2y ago

5 more years than what Phil Leotardo spend in the can, and 7 more than what it took to get a file picker thumbnail in Gnome.

thefaux 2y ago

Sounds like maybe they should rewrite firefox in rust.

vortico 2y ago

Why so many posts about Firefox bugs getting fixed after N years? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox+bug+years https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox+bug+years

sgerenser 2y ago
I think people are amazed and impressed that bugs more than 6 months old aren't just auto-closed with "There's been several new versions since this bug was filed, please check if this still exists on the latest version, and if so file a new bug."

frankfrank13 2y ago

> Closed: 24 years ago → 6 hours ago

Xenoamorphous 2y ago

Off topic but I really dislike the trend of using “human readable durations” like “a month ago”, just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. Outlook (Mac version at least) is the worst offender. For emails prior to the current day it will say for example just “yesterday” and it will only show you the time if you click on the email. I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless.

gravescale 2y ago
If you have your system time wrong somehow, GitLab will happily tell you a bug fix was closed in 4 hours' time.
perilunar 2y ago
> just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. But use ISO 8601 or a month name FFS — dd/mm or mm/dd is not always obvious.
latexr 2y ago
Hover over the date to see the exact day and time.
- Sakos 2y ago
  Gitlab shows this relative date. I repeatedly have this issue where I'm trying to look through commits and I have to mouse over every single commit repeatedly while trying to figure out when something was changed in relation to other changes. So I mouse over one, mouse over the next, go back to the previous one, forget what the other one was, mouse over that, then mouse over a fourth and repeat. Who came up with this insane bullshit? It'll show me a bunch of commits all made 4 days ago. I have no idea what day that was. Was it Monday? Wednesday? I have logs from the 16th, does Gitlab think that was 4 days ago or 5?
- jvdvegt 2y ago
  Hover? I'm on mobile...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

postepowanieadm 2y ago

Textareas are so overlooked, they feel really like 1990s, yet there is no real alternative with spellchecking and os integration.

ece 2y ago

BugBot was on to something: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33654#c190 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33654#c190 "The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 27 duplicates, 103 votes and 91 CCs. :emilio, could you consider increasing the bug severity? For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation."

ayewo 2y ago

On a related note, starting today, I noticed that x.com (fka Twitter.com) is no longer working in Firefox. I get the following error: > Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. > Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com

pyb 2y ago
Same here. This also happened about a week ago, but was reverted/fixed within a few hours. So, I'm hoping Twitter will fix this.
jraph 2y ago
Only very remotely related if you squint hard enough though, no? (sorry for sounding a bit rude, not my intention, I would like to read friendly but I can't find a nice way to point this out and still want to do it - it's just that I wouldn't find it very enjoyable if all HNers started commenting about general / random issues they encountered on some product P in a submission about a specific/historical issue in P - I'm sure we all encountered some issue while using Firefox / any browser at least once, especially with Twitter which screams buggy to me as a distant observer, I remember consistently having to try and refresh pages several times a few years ago to display a 140 character tweet - awful experience)
- ayewo 2y ago
  Well, x.com was working completely fine on my version of Firefox until yesterday so it’s an intentional breakage for Firefox users. My comment was more of a PSA to other Firefox users who are likely the ones also reading about the bug fix here, so it’s definitely on-topic. I guess you disagree which is fine. If they don’t fix it, I have to either switch to a different browser or device (mobile) to visit x.com. The good news is I’ll spend less time there.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

There are a few other long running software. What's the longest age of a fixed emacs bug, for instance?

lordgrenville 2y ago
Here's one older than the FF one: https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2024-02-10-fixing-a-twenty-six-years-old-emacs-bug.html https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2024-02-10-fixing-a-twenty-six-...

hleszek 2y ago

Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE

luke_warlow 2y ago
The duplicated bug was where the fix was landed, it was just easier to use a new bug rather than discuss things on the 25 year old bug.
rurban 2y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1830576 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1830576 was the ticket with the actual fix. This bug had hundreds of duplicates. And finally Chromium, Safari and Firefox came together to fix it.

dist-epoch 2y ago

At least they don't sweep bugs under the rug after 6 months of inactivity as many projects.

omoikane 2y ago
I believe the common term for this is "bug bankruptcy". And when teams declare bug bankruptcy too often, it's called "bug insolvency". I have only seen "bug insolvency" once, but "bug bankruptcy" seemed to be commonly used.

suzzer99 2y ago

AWS solves this problem by periodically wiping out old bugs and any mention of them.

kevincox 2y ago
The ostrich strategy to avoiding bugs.

johannes1234321 2y ago

With such old bugs I often wonder whether it's not best to simply close them. Few people will browse them and many will be "accidentally" closed by reworking of different subsystems. But if they are still relevant somebody will file it, again. If not reopened it's probably not a problem anymore.

largehotcoffee 2y ago
I see people say this all the time, it's a harmful bad practice. Don't auto close bug reports after x amount of time.
mixmastamyk 2y ago
Bug Wars II: CADT Strikes Back. ;-)
- jraph 2y ago
  Yeah, jwz might be a bit weird at times but he is right on this. I don't understand what problem closing bugs solves. If you want to close a bug, check if it doesn't reproduce. And if it doesn't reproduce, give the author the chance to confirm. A bug report is documentation. It is valuable. It's a gift. If written well enough of course. If you feel open bug reports clutters your bug tracker, first I would suggest you are watching them from the wrong perspective, and second I would suggest you might need to take advantage of some triage / organization tool (better) like labels or projects. Open issue doesn't mean "planned" or "will look into this". Saying this as a software developer. Who has also been reporting some number of issues. Reporting takes time.
aeontech 2y ago
The problem with that is the dismissal of the time investment by the original filer who may have spent a significant amount of time getting reproducible steps, screenshots, and other relevant information into the bug. It treats users' time as free. I think there's a subtle but important distinction between _closing_ the old bugs outright, and leaving them open but marking them as "Verify" with a comment like "we're not sure but it may have been fixed with recent work - can anyone confirm if it's still reproducible?"

dbacar 2y ago

I dont recall we had firefox in 99. Even internet explorer , was it there ? good times.

kemitche 2y ago
The bug was originally filed against Netscape Navigator per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431738
z500 2y ago
The bug was actually filed just over 24 years ago, and BugZilla rounded up. And back then it was Mozilla before it was Firefox

dyauspitr 2y ago

Holy shit, Firefox has been around for 25 years?

jgtor 2y ago
No, this was filed for originally Netscape Navigator which codebase evolved into modern Firefox.

celdon25 2y ago

Feels like my experience waiting for Microsoft or Jetbrains to fix bugs